Catastrophe

For years it has been a favorite cruelty of children to tie cherry bombs to cats' tails. Now the Rand Corp.'s "Soviet Cybernetics Review" reports an intricate variation: Russian scientists, says Rand, are studying the feasibility of training a cat to pilot air-to-air missiles to their targets.

Theoretically, a severed cat's brain might be educated to recognize and respond to a set of optical impulses and transmit signals to guide a missile onto its target. Or, cheaper still, a cat called Yossarian might be trained to twitch a certain muscle if a target he had learned was not centered on the cross hairs.

Toward the end of World War II, Behaviorist B.F. Skinner was working on a similar project for the U.S. Navy --using pigeons. Skinner was evolving a kind of majority-vote bombardiering, using three pigeons on the theory that two at least would peck correctly on the left or right of a target screen. Then, as Skinner recalls, "the Manhattan Project came along and there was no need for pinpoint bombing."

There are other cases: the Russians have trained descendants of Pavlov's dog to carry mines to tanks. During World War II, a Swede trained young seals to carry limpet charges. They were rewarded with cream--a classic mobilization of guns and butter. Skinner regards the cat stratagem as overly complex but theoretically possible. "The only trouble is," he observes, "that cats get airsick."

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