Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

“Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.” In the monograph, Greene wrote, “The trend of each major conflict, being characterized by increased death, human misery, and property destruction, could be reversed.” His seminal vision for psychochemical warfare—a term he coined—was to incapacitate a man with drugs on the battlefield but not to kill him. Greene believed that in this way the face of warfare could change from barbaric to human. Incapacitating agents were “gentle” weapons; they knocked a man out without permanent injury. With psychochemical warfare, Greene explained, America could conquer its enemies “without the wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.” Greene was not proposing to use low levels of tabun gas on the battlefield. He was talking about using other kinds of incapacitating agents, drugs that could immobilize or temporarily paralyze a person, “hallucinogenic or psychotomimetic drugs… whose effects mimic insanity or psychosis.” “There can be no doubt that their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue,” Greene explained.