Recently a US Air Force report co-written by the colonel was leaked. It details many of the other "non-lethal technologies" currently in covert development within military labs. Some of them make the gay bomb look positively conventional. There's the "low-frequency infrasound" which "easily penetrates most buildings and vehicles" and creates "nausea, loss of bowel control, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage and death". (The report is quite laissez-faire about its definition of the term "non-lethal".) There's the race-specific stink bomb and the chameleon camouflage suit, both of which have apparently never got off the ground because nobody can work out how to invent them, and a special pheromone that "can be used to mark target individuals and then release bees to attack them".

Then there's the prophet hologram - "the projection of the image of an ancient god over an enemy capitol whose public communications have been seized and used against it in a massive psychological operation."

Commentators have suggested that the Pentagon must be embarrassed that these crazy endeavours have come to light, but I suspect they are pleased: it makes human-rights abuses seem amusingly hare-brained as opposed to chilling. US military scientists believe it is their calling to reach out to the furthest corners of their imaginations to try these things out, and once in a while they invent something that actually works. The Taser gun was nurtured by Alexander.

After my book was published, the colonel went on national US radio to claim that he had never met me. I was a fantasist who just pretended to meet his interviewees. In fact, I had hours of film showing me at his house. It was a stupid weapon to be levelled against me, but I suppose it just might have worked.