Original subtitles

Throughout time, governments and the people

who work for them have done strange

and even terrible things in the name of national interest.

Tonight, strange weapons intended to kill.

From a weapon fired on the moon...

Scientists have to now start figuring out

how to make a gun that will work as it does on earth

but on the moon.

To an experimental nuclear weapon

that needs unusual helpers to make it work...

So some genius decides to enlist an animal

to live inside a nuclear bomb.

The safety of the entire western world

depends on these barnyard animals.

And even a plot to defeat Hitler using hormones..

This would constitute a sneak attack

against Adolf Hitler's masculine health,

and he wouldn't even know it was happening.

Dangerous threats sometimes inspire strange weapons.

It's time to bring these stories to light.

At the height of the cold war,

the U.S. and Russia raced to create weapons

to give them an edge.

In the late 1950s, the Soviets come up

with what could be a game changer

a handgun that kills without a trace.

In August 1961, a kgb hitman walks

into a west German police station and defects.

Bohdan stashynsky is interrogated by the CIA.

And he spills the beans

on a high-level hit he just carried out

using a top secret gun that induces

a heart attack on the victim.

He claims to have poisoned two Ukrainian exiles,

both very much enemies of the Soviet state.

Stashynsky claims to have used a modified pistol

that, instead of firing a bullet,

sprays a little bit of a spray of hydrogen cyanide vapor

right into somebody's face.

The CIA have never heard of a heart-attack gun,

but it inspires the agency to create

its own untraceable weapon.

And in 1968, a highly classified science unit,

code name project mknaomi, gets to work.

When CIA finds out that the Soviets have a poison gun,

they set out on a mission to create something even better.

They want a toxin that's fatal, untraceable, undetectable,

and would look like natural causes

in the case of the victim, if they were ever discovered.

Toxins are basically nature's poisons.

They are things that are highly poisonous

that exist out there in the natural world.

They land on something called saxitoxin.

Saxitoxin is found in contaminated clams,

and it is 1,000 times more deadly than cyanide.

It works very quickly to disrupt your nervous system,

interfering with your ability to breathe,

causing heart failure, leading to a heart attack.

The toxin breaks down quickly

and is likely to have disappeared

before an autopsy is carried out.

It's the perfect poison.

The only problem is, how to deliver it?

The Soviet cyanide gun has a lot of drawbacks.

You have to be very close to use it.

You really had to get in somebody's face,

and you had to kind of hope

that the breeze wasn't blowing towards you.

A change in the wind

could make the person shooting the weapon the victim.

Plus, you never know whether or not somebody else

is going to be exposed to the cyanide.

The obvious solution is to use a bullet, not a spray.

But bullets create their own problems.

If they use a bullet or pellet,

it will leave a physical trace, even if the poison doesn't.

So the mknaomi unit develops the only way

to covertly shoot a target with saxitoxin.

They freeze the poison into a hair-thin dart

that will leave nothing but the tiniest little pinprick.

But does this strange weapon

ever get off the drawing board?

In 1975, accusations against the CIA

lead to a congressional investigation,

and the agency must answer questions

regarding alleged criminal activity.

CIA director William Colby must bring out

some skeletons from the closet,

and he reveals project mknaomi.

Congress gets to see more than just documents.

Have you brought with you

some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA

to use this poison for

- we have indeed. - For killing people?

Don't point it at me.

It's the kind of thing that would make James Bond jealous.

Does this pistol fire the dart?

Yes, it does.

CIA takes a Colt m1911 gun and actually adjusts it

so that it can be fired from an electronic chamber

so it's silent,

and it fires frozen darts instead of firing bullets.

So that when it fires, it fires silently?

Almost silently, yes.

- Very little, very little... - What range does it have?

- About 100 yards, 100 meters. - About 100 meters' range?

Right.

The heart-attack gun is, in many ways, the perfect weapon.

If you're the victim, you may not even know you were hit.

You may only feel a sting, a pinch,

or maybe just an itch

before you have a heart attack and die.

For the coroner or investigator

trying to determine the cause of death,

everything is going to look like natural causes.

It's going to look like a natural heart attack.

It's now clear that the gun not only exists, but it works.

But who were the intended targets?

In the wake of the select committee,

the CIA is forced to release

the largest-ever cache of declassified CIA projects.

Detailed within are covert assassination plans

to poison Congolese president patrice lumumba

and Cuban revolutionary fidel Castro.

There's no direct connection between project mknaomi

and subsequent assassination attempts.

And the CIA continues to deny

that its heart-attack gun was ever used in the field.

But during world war ii, there is a secret weapon

that is fully deployed in American skies.

A silent winter's night is suddenly broken

by the sound of an explosion.

Locals rush out to see what has happened.

They find debris

and what looks like parts of a balloon

and bomb shrapnel.

Could it be a homemade attempt at bomb building

or a stray military test?

Within days, there are reports of similar events

coming in from all over the country.

Same sort of debris is found off the coast of Hawaii,

in kalispell, Montana, Marshall, Alaska, and Oregon.

Is the United States under attack?

The army's military intelligence department

investigates.

What they find is that these

are hydrogen-filled paper balloons.

While they look pretty, these are not party balloons.

The lanterns carry a deadly cargo

four incendiary devices and one 30-pound bomb.

The air force is told,

if you see these balloons while you're flying your plane,

shoot them down with extreme prejudice.

But one mystery remains.

Who is making these weapons?

The army's military intelligence department

starts looking at the balloons

to try to figure out where they came from.

And they realize something incredible.

They're not made of plastic.

They're made of paper that derives from the kozo tree,

and that tree is native to Asia.

But there's more, because they're able to analyze

the sand inside the ballast bags

and determine that they come from a very specific place

the beaches of southeastern Japan.

It's clear Japan is attacking the U.S.

With a very strange weapon

paper balloons carrying bombs

that can travel across the pacific.

The Japanese discover that air currents

at high altitudes travel from west to east.

The deadly balloons, named fu-go,

can ride the jet stream on a four-day journey,

all the way across the ocean.

It's an ingenious use of natural resources.

One of the key features of the balloon bomb

is that it doesn't have a pilot on board.

And so you can deploy military force against the United States

without risking your vital military personnel.

The trouble is, you can't guide it,

and so you don't know where it's going to drop.

It's indiscriminate.

The bomb's explosive power

isn't enough to do huge damage.

Its real threat is starting fires.

The state of California is especially vulnerable

to forest fires.

And the Japanese were hoping that the balloon-bomb campaign

would trigger forest fires across the state.

The U.S. military reacts to that

by keeping aircraft on standby to douse any part of California

that might be affected by a balloon bomb

that triggers a forest fire.

The government keeps the bombs secret

and out of the press because they want the Japanese

to think their campaign is failing.

Then disaster strikes.

In may of 1945, a minister and his wife

were taking five Sunday-school children out for a picnic.

While the minister was parking the car,

his wife took the kids into the forest.

They find a strange object... a large balloon.

When they approach to get a closer look...

They accidentally trigger the balloon's deadly 30-pound bomb.

The blast kills everybody

the five children and the minister's wife

and they become the only mainland American casualties

of world war ii.

A Sunday-school picnic getting ripped apart

is bad news that's going to spread fast.

So the government has no choice

but to come clean with the public.

In may 1945, secret intelligence

on Japanese balloon bombs is finally released to the press.

In the final reckoning,

the balloons are more ingenious than effective.

Of an estimated 9,000 fu-go bombs

released by the Japanese,

only 285 are officially recorded

as hitting their target.

In 1954, the British decide to develop

a new kind of nuclear weapon

one that can be buried underground, like a land mine.

Not surprisingly, the project runs into problems

right from the start.

In the aftermath of world war ii,

britain has a very real fear that the Soviet union

might launch an assault on Western Europe.

And if so, it will involve the Soviet hordes,

thousands of tanks and other armored vehicles,

millions of troops marching through Germany

on their way to the conquest of Europe.

To boost their defenses, the military decide

they need a new kind of weapon.

The British have been using land mines

for defensive positions for hundreds of years.

And they understand that a single anti-tank mine

might destroy a tank.

But what if you could destroy 1,000 tanks

with a single land mine?

Strategically placed nuclear land mines

could wipe out an entire invading force.

Plus, the area will be contaminated with fallout,

forcing the invaders to retreat.

This could be a game changer

a weapon the world has never seen before.

The British code-name the project blue peacock.

30 miles outside London,

engineers at a British army research site

begin developing a nuclear land mine.

To save money, they adapt a warhead

that's already in service called the blue danube.

But there's a challenge.

If you plant a 10-kiloton nuke in the ground,

it can't be as sensitive as a regular land mine.

Land mines used during world war ii

are triggered through contact by the enemy

and, unfortunately, civilians as well sometimes.

But you can't have a nuclear bomb going off

because somebody steps on it.

A dog Walker straying into the wrong field

could accidentally trigger a 10-kiloton explosion.

They decide to give the mine an off setting,

rendering it perfectly safe.

It will basically be sleeping underground.

When called into action, it can be triggered,

either by setting a timer or remotely

by way of a three-mile cable.

Problem solved.

British experts soon realize something else.

A buried nuclear bomb needs more safeguards.

It needs to be waterproof, weatherproof,

and tamper-proof.

You'll have to encase this weapon

in a massive steel shell,

and that makes it both large and extremely heavy.

You're looking at 7 tons of weight in this monster.

In 1957, the British army ordered ten

of these nuclear land mines.

They have a plan to plant them

along the west German border as a method of repelling

a potential Soviet ground invasion.

It soon becomes clear

there's an additional challenge they've overlooked.

The components to trigger a blue peacock weapon

are very sensitive to temperature.

They have to be kept above freezing temperatures.

But putting them in the ground,

underneath the frozen soil of a European winter,

makes them very vulnerable to not functioning on command.

So much has been invested in this weapon.

They need to make it work.

So no solution is off the table.

And they come up with something just so far outside of the box,

you have to really wonder how on earth they even got there.

To make this weapon work, they must keep it warm.

Perhaps there's a way to use

some kind of a biological heating system

a living organism that might generate enough body heat

to keep everything above freezing temperature.

Obviously, it can't be a human.

No one's going to sign up for that type of job.

So they figure it has to be an animal that can maintain

its own body heat

and tolerate being kept in a confined space

for days on end.

There's one obvious candidate for the job

chickens.

After all, factory-farmed chickens

are already kept alive in minimal light and space

similar conditions to the underground bomb.

In the event that you have to basically set a timer

on this atomic device,

you could put chickens inside the bomb casing

with enough food and water to sustain them

in these tight quarters in the darkness.

Their body heat will ensure that the timer functions

up to a week in the future.

If the blast occurs,

it will create a crater 640 feet in diameter.

The chickens will be incinerated instantly,

but they will die British heroes.

Before any chickens are roasted,

another solution is found

fiberglass pillows to keep the nuke warm.

The blue peacocks are good to go

until one more problem comes up.

The only way to transport them to their final location

is by truck.

But once that truck,

loaded with a 7 1/2-ton steel cylinder, drives off-road,

it will inevitably get weighed down and stuck.

The mines are so heavy that transporting them

is hugely impractical and almost impossible

to do in any covert way.

After so many setbacks,

the project is finally canceled in 1958,

and the British nuclear land mine is buried forever.

With the passage of time, even the British civil service

comes to appreciate the absurdity

of project blue peacock.

The files are finally declassified in 2004

on April fool's day.

Strange weapons come in all shapes and sizes.

In 1961, the Soviet union decides to create

the biggest one the world has ever seen

whatever it takes.

Nikita khrushchev is absolutely paranoid

that the rest of the world might think the Americans

are getting the upper hand in the cold war.

According to his reports,

america has five times the nuclear weapons

as the Soviet union.

So he plans a big event so the world knows Soviet power

is still here and it's real.

The U.S. has already tested

powerful 15-million-ton hydrogen bombs.

The blast radius of this weapon is a fireball

4 1/2 miles in diameter.

But Soviet leader khrushchev is unimpressed.

Khrushchev wants a bomb ten times the size

of the largest American hydrogen bomb in history.

He demands that Soviet scientists

devise a 100-million-ton bomb.

The bomb could kill close to a million people.

Khrushchev makes no secret of his intentions.

He publicly boasts about it.

Soviet scientists race to meet his demands.

Scaling a nuclear bomb to this level had never occurred.

Khrushchev is demanding the impossible,

and khrushchev expects results.

Eventually, the lead scientist,

andrei sakharov, succeeds.

They named it project 602,

but it was nicknamed tsar bomb a.

Tsar bomb a... Russian for "king of bombs."

Now khrushchev is determined to test it.

When sakharov hears that they're planning to test

this 100-megaton nuclear bomb, he has massive concerns.

There's no way you can set this bomb off

without creating an enormous region

of radioactive fallout.

Just the act of testing this bomb

is going to render enormous areas of the Soviet union

uninhabitable for 1,000 years.

So he takes action.

He goes, and he replaces half the uranium with lead.

Even sakharov's massively scaled down tsar bomb a

is three times larger than anything

the Americans had ever detonated.

The bomb prepped, it's time to see what it can do.

But how do you detonate a bomb this size

without killing the pilot of the delivery plane?

The plan is to release the bomb from an airplane

and have it explode 2 1/2 miles above the earth's surface,

which means that whatever plane drops it,

it's going to be incinerated.

So this is a suicide mission.

Now, to give the pilot a fighting chance,

they coat the plane with a special paint

that will deflect some of the blast's searing heat.

They attach a 17,000-square-foot parachute

to the bomb to slow its descent

to give the pilot time to get the plane away.

But even after doing all of that,

at best, they have a 50/50 chance of survival.

Even under test conditions,

the devastation on the ground will be immense.

So the tsar bomb is taken to the arctic wastes,

one and half thousand miles north of Moscow.

Preparations almost complete,

the team hit another stumbling block.

The tsar bomb is too big to fit inside the plane.

Normally, if a bomb is dropping

from underneath a plane, it's loaded into the bomb bay

and released when the doors open.

But this bomb is way too big,

so they just have to strap it to the outside.

With a makeshift solution in place,

it's time to drop the bomb.

It's going to take about 30 minutes

to get up to altitude with this enormous bomb

hanging from the fuselage of the airplane.

Once the pilot is at launch altitude,

he releases the bomb.

This thing is a manmade natural disaster.

The blast from the tsar bomb

is so big that it creates a mushroom cloud

that's 60 miles wide.

That's twice the size of New York City.

It's an absolute catastrophe,

the damage that this single bomb does.

It collapses houses in an evacuated town

60 miles away.

500 miles away,

the blast wave was still breaking windows.

The pilot is 30 miles away, but it's not far enough.

The delivery aircraft was like a leaf

caught in a tornado.

The shock wave is so big, it hits the plane,

and he actually falls an entire kilometer

before regaining control of the aircraft.

Shockwaves from the blast register

across much of Northern Europe,

letting the rest of the world know

that khrushchev's super bomb works.

Shock waves of outrage come next.

It turns out that exploding a giant nuke in the atmosphere

doesn't make you popular.

The test is denounced widely, not only in america

but also by one of khrushchev's key men

the bomb's designer, andrei sakharov.

In fact, he was influential

in a 1963 above ground test ban treaty

that went into effect and was signed by the Soviet union

and the other nuclear powers, including the United States.

In 1942, the U.S. created

the office of strategic services

a secretive agency designed to help win world war ii

through both espionage and sabotage.

The oss hatches many bold plans,

none stranger than a plot against Adolf Hitler.

Officers at the oss believe that they can bring the war

to a swift end by eliminating the leader of the Nazis.

So they draw up these plans

to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

One option to take out the fuehrer is poison.

Undercover agents in Nazi Germany

could spike Hitler's food.

But how?

It's not easy to simply slip something

into Adolf Hitler's food.

There are levels of protection all around the fuehrer,

and he even has a food taster.

The oss next turn to an idea that's the brainchild

of lead scientist Stanley Lovell...

And it's a little more outside the box...

Spike Hitler's food with sex hormones.

Lovell's team conducts studies

of Hitler's public behavior,

particularly his violent outbursts.

And they come to a problematic conclusion

that this is a character trait associated with females

and the emotional instability of women.

Lovell is convinced that Adolf Hitler is falling

right in the middle of this gender spectrum,

and that if you just dose him with a little bit of estrogen,

he would be less inclined

toward violent "confrontationalism"

and more inclined toward engagement.

You could get a peace treaty out of somebody like that.

Lovell lands on estrogen as his secret weapon.

Estrogen is the female reproductive hormone.

If taken by men,

it actually reduces the male hormone, testosterone,

leading to the man taking on more female characteristics.

And it makes the perfect poison.

Odorless, it's colorless, and in the right amounts,

it cannot be detected.

This would constitute a sneak attack

against Adolf Hitler's masculine health,

and he wouldn't even know it was happening.

The only problem

getting the hormone into Hitler's food.

Hitler is a well-known vegetarian,

and he's a paranoiac about his food supply,

which means he will only eat vegetables grown in gardens

under the direct control of the Nazi regime.

The idea is that an operative

might be able to infiltrate the gardens

and either intercept the produce

or inject it in the ground with hypodermic needles

filled with estrogen

that will then be conveyed via the vegetables

to the fuehrer's plate.

But the effects of sex hormones are gradual.

So we're not talking fuehrer to fraulein in one single hit.

We're talking about months before the effects

will even be seen.

Lovell claims to have put his plan in action,

sending female hormones to agents behind enemy lines.

But Hitler remained aggressively confrontational

until the war's end.

The plan may have failed,

but that doesn't stop Stanley Lovell.

In 1943, he comes up with another way to win victory,

this time with a stink bomb so powerful,

it will derail enemy attacks.

They're looking for the ultimate stink bomb

one that's so disgusting,

the enemy is just humiliated and left incapable of fighting.

A substance or device that is just so pungent

and eye-watering that it clears the room out...

Is not any different philosophically

than a grenade full of tear gas that clears the room out

because your eyes are burning.

It's the same kind of principle.

The oss affectionately names the bomb "who, me?"

Because if a smell erupts

in a room of people and someone is blamed,

they typically respond, "who, me?"

As if they're innocent.

There's an entire industry

a hundreds-of-year-old industry

with a lot of science and engineering behind it

for spreading smells

isolating particular compounds, blending particular compounds,

storing them, dispensing them.

It's the perfume industry.

To concoct a stink bomb suitable for combat,

they seek out the best nose in the business.

The oss bring in chemical engineer Ernest Crocker.

Now, Crocker has spent years

developing an almost encyclopedic study of smells

for the perfume industry.

His challenge is simple

produce a noxious anti-perfume

that agents can deploy behind enemy lines.

And he conducts months of tests to create the perfect stench.

Crocker ends up settling on just a cocktail of chemicals

that assaults the senses.

We're talking about the smell of vomit,

just rancid butter, urine, rotten eggs,

foot odor, and excrement.

Confident his concoction will repulse German forces

Crocker turns his attention to the Japanese.

There's this prevailing notion that asians

might actually be more accepting of filthy smells,

indicative of the deeply racist ideas

that are prevalent at the time.

And this leads Crocker to brew up a second smell

for use in the far east, with notes of rotting flesh.

The stinking potions are made,

but how do you transport a smell to the front line?

Now they're faced with another dilemma.

They need a suitable container to package the noxious weapon.

But this proves much harder than brewing the smell.

It isn't enough to just come up with this anti-perfume.

You also need to come up with something that can carry

this rancid liquid behind enemy lines.

So they spend months working on a suitable container

one that doesn't leak but one that can also be easily opened.

Crocker's team ultimately comes up with the design,

which is a small tube.

And it's mobile and can fit into a soldier's kit.

The stink bomb goes into production

with a test run of 600 tubes.

According to Stanley Lovell, they use Chinese rebels.

The rebels spray it on the uniforms of Japanese soldiers,

but the war ends before they can actually get

a full-scale assault on the senses.

In 1959, vice president Nixon

visits Moscow on a goodwill mission.

But the Soviets don't care about goodwill.

Vice president Richard Nixon

is prepping for a trip behind the iron curtain.

He will become the first high-ranking American

to visit Moscow in 14 years.

And he is due to officially open an exhibition

of American science and culture in Moscow.

After a recent scare at the U.S. embassy,

Nixon's security team is on high alert.

The U.S. embassy in Moscow is reporting high levels

of radiation happening in specific rooms

throughout the embassy building itself.

When you scan for radiation levels,

there's a certain level that's "acceptable,"

that's just going to exist within any room or place.

Those readings were slightly above acceptable.

Nixon's security team

are afraid he's walking into a trap.

They suggest taking geiger counters to Moscow

to monitor the radiation levels in his living quarters.

Nixon wants to avoid any displays of paranoia.

He says no to geiger counters,

but he suggests the team bring these measuring devices

called dosimeters.

These are pocket-sized instruments

that measure radiation exposure.

The secret service team travels out to Russia

ahead of the vice president,

taking their dosimeters with them.

White house special agent James golden

is tasked with scoping out Nixon's Moscow residence

ahead of the vice president's trip.

And one of the things that he does

is he starts to look for radioactive detection

within where the vice president was staying.

But their dosimeter devices don't pick up anything unusual.

Everything's normal, and there's no sign of danger.

On July 23rd, Nixon lands at Moscow airport.

What happens next is kept under wraps

and classified for 63 years.

- The nixons arrive. - The ambassador arrives.

All of the sort of formalities are starting to take place.

And as a result of that slightly elevated reading,

agent golden decides to do basically a second pass,

a second scan to look for radioactivity.

I think he was not expecting to find any.

When they reached Nixon's sleeping quarters,

something alarming happens.

James golden's dosimeter

soars up to a reading of 35 roentgens.

A roentgen is a unit of measure

for counting your exposure to radiation.

And in the workplace,

a permissible exposure to radiation

is just 1/10 of a roentgen per week.

35 roentgens will have a physical effect on the body

by attacking its immune system.

It's not immediately fatal,

but prolonged exposure to radiation

can lead to long-term illnesses, such as cancer.

The Americans suspect the radiation

is caused by microwaves aimed at the building.

At the time, microwave weapons,

or directed-energy weapons, don't officially exist.

The American government is only just starting to develop them.

A directed-energy weapon

is a weapon that can take focused energy

and drive it through an antenna

at a target a great distance away.

It's silent, it's invisible,

and people don't even know they're being attacked

until it's too late.

It's terrifying.

If the Soviets are shooting microwaves,

they could target the vice president.

The team runs checks on the rest of the house,

and the readings drop to a normal level.

This is weird.

Nixon's security team can't find the source

of the radiation, and they don't want to cause a panic

that will disrupt the vice president's trip.

The next morning,

the readings are still dramatically high.

So golden and his partner take a gamble.

Because he knows that that room is bugged

as a CIA officer, we always assume

everyone's listening at all times.

As a result, he does what we call talking to the room,

and he says, wow, these radiation levels are so high!

I can't believe it!

And then they wait to see if the message had any impact.

At 3:30 P.M... The dosimeter suddenly calmed down.

What that tells us is someone is always listening.

There's no question.

And also what that tells us

is this was something that the Russians purposely did.

Now, what their motive was, I don't know.

Was it to kill? Was it to hurt? Was it to frustrate?

We don't know the answer to that question.

Nixon completes his visit without further issues.

Afterwards, the agents report their findings.

But their superiors don't want to derail.

Nixon's peace initiative

by accusing the Soviets of a plot.

So James Gordon keeps his silence... Until 1976,

when a scandal hits the newspapers.

1976, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow,

a man named Walter stoessel, started reporting symptoms.

He was reporting nausea and bleeding from the eyes.

These are classic symptoms of radiation poisoning.

There's a real fear that the Soviet microwaves

are silently attacking Americans

and could be doing fatal harm.

The state department is called in to conduct a health study

into whether U.S. diplomatic staff in Moscow

has been affected by radiation poisoning.

With talk of Russian microwaves all over the press,

James golden tells the inquiry what he believes

happened during Nixon's visit to Moscow.

Golden believes that there's

a diabolical directed-energy weapon

being used to irradiate Nixon's room specifically.

But the state department's health study

finds no strong evidence linking Moscow radiation

to subsequent health problems.

With that, the trail runs cold.

And the Russians have never been brought to book

for directing microwaves at American politicians.

In the 1960s,

the U.S. and Soviet union vied to put a man on the moon.

But what if they both succeed?

Could the cold war come to a head with a lunar shootout?

Engineers at rock island army base

specialize in designing weapons for combat on earth.

But regular guns may not do the job

if war breaks out in space.

So the army set up a future weapons office

to design weapons for astronauts.

We can't go anywhere without taking a gun,

even the moon.

The moon is a new environment,

and scientists have to now start figuring out

how to make a gun or how to make artillery

that will work as it does on earth but on the moon.

First of all, the moon has a very thin atmosphere.

Regular firearms need liquid lubricants

to keep them in working order.

But in a vacuum, lubricants are liable to evaporate.

And so the gun's sliding mechanisms will jam.

What's more, guns have recoil

the force that throws a gun back after it shoots a bullet.

But in the moon's low gravity,

the recoil from a regular firearm

could throw the soldier back so violently

that they could leave the lunar surface

and just float off into space.

A radical design is needed

for a reliable firearm to protect astronauts.

Enter the spring-propelled spherical projectile.

By replacing the conventional firing mechanisms

with a compressed spring,

there are none of the traditional sliding parts.

So it's less reliant on lubrication

and less liable to jam or freeze

in essentially a zero-atmosphere environment.

A spring-propulsion system like this

also is likely to have less recoil,

ensuring that the lunar soldier

doesn't get thrown back into space

after they pull the trigger.

Another hazard that could disarm a space soldier

is the moon's extreme temperatures.

During the day, it gets up to 250 degrees fahrenheit

and plummets at night to minus-250 degrees.

So the army's regular m14 rifle could freeze

or explode under these extreme temperature conditions.

There's also the risk of the gun's metal parts

fusing together in extreme subzero temperatures.

It's a reaction called "cold welding."

It would render the weapon immediately unusable.

This is where the spin-stabilized micro gun

would come in handy.

The gun does away with many of the complex mechanics

of the standard firearm,

so there are fewer parts that are vulnerable to freezing

or exploding through excess heat.

And it can be assembled

using a variety of nonmetal materials,

like ceramics or plastics,

which is perfect to avoid cold welding.

It would shoot a 4-pound projectile.

And it could travel at over 3,000 feet per second.

This could go very far, very fast,

with pretty good accuracy.

But firing off a few rounds on the moon

does come with a caveat.

If you fire a bullet and it misses its target,

that bullet could potentially travel

through outer space forever.

In 1965, the future weapons office

publishes their report,

illustrating a space gun for every occasion.

But none of the designs make it off the drawing board,

because in 1967,

the U.S. signs the outer space treaty,

banning weapons on the moon.

As long as there's conflict between nations,

governments will continue to develop strange weapons

some that simply defy belief,

others we hope will never be deployed.

I'm David duchovny.

Thanks for watching "secrets declassified."