ABSTRACT
This first chapter will provide some necessary historical context to current military neuroscience research by looking at secret brain research and germ warfare programs of the Cold War era. It will be shown that military neuroscience grew out of the desire of intelligence agencies to find technological methods for mental coercion to be used in interrogations and for the brainwashing and ‘mind control’ of human agents in human intelligence (HUMINT) operations. This secret research conducted by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s (largely under the codename MK ULTRA) also overlapped with biological and chemical warfare research of the US Army. The chapter will therefore discuss some aspects of the US Army’s biological and chemical warfare programs that aimed to covertly spray enemy populations with nonlethal agents to disrupt their societies. In addition, it will be shown that the CIA and DARPA did not stop at researching hallucinogens, but also developed an intense interest in other methods of behavioural control, such as the influence of electromagnetic fields on the mind, as well as the development of brain implants as pioneered by neuroscientists Robert Heath and Jose Delgado. By the 1970s, the interest of the US defence establishment had shifted towards a very unusual direction: the investigation of the paranormal in view of psychic spying. This was directly inspired by similar research that was pursued in the Soviet Union at the time. It will be argued that the paranormal spying was most likely a cover story to hide Western and Soviet pursuit of new types of nonlethal electromagnetic weapons and biotelemetry. The chapter will conclude that although much of the mind control research of the era was probably unsuccessful, it must have been successful enough to justify continuing research into brain manipulation and new NLW (discussed in chapters five and six) that seem to be based on ideas that were already under investigation half a century ago, e.g. brain chips, hallucinogens, microwave, ultrasound, infrasound and light and sound-based weapons that can potentially affect mental states and mental capacity.
