The Man who Build Huge Guns for Saddam Hussein
In the late 1980s, the Iraqis started a project to build a series of guns large enough to launch satellites into space and other more destructive payloads. This work was done mostly in secret. The project ended abruptly when the inventor was found dead.
The Man Behind the Gun
Gerald Vincent Bull was born in March 1928 in Ontario, Canada. He was one of ten children. His mother died when he was three and his father abandoned the family. The children were split between family members. Bull was raised by an aunt and uncle.
At a young age, Bull became interested in flight and aeronautics. He started to experiment by building balsa wood planes. When he went to university, Bull signed up for a class in aeronautical engineering. He graduated in 1944 from Regiopolis College. He originally planned to attend medical school but ended up entering the new aeronautical engineering program at the University of Toronto. After graduating from the new program in 1948, he joined the newly formed Institute of Aerodynamics. He did very well in his studies, by earning “a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at the age of 24”.
An Interest in Superguns
After completing his education, he went to work for the Canadian defense ministry, specifically the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment (CARDE) which was formed to study artillery. Bull focused on reaching hypersonic speeds with heavy artillery.
During this time, Bull would receive a visit that would change the trajectory of his life. In 1965, a middle-aged German woman visited him. Her father had been one of the engineers who had worked on the Paris Gun during World War I. (I took a look at the Paris gun in my article on the V-3 supercanon.) Basically, the Paris gun was a huge artillery gun that had to be moved by railroad. It could launch a 234-pound projectile 81 miles. The Paris Gun inflicted more psychological damage than real damage. The Allies wanted to capture it for study but were never able to. The Germans were able to disassemble it and hide the parts. They were also able to hide the blueprints. Those blueprints were now in Bull’s hands. This would start his lifelong obsession with superguns. However, Bull wanted his guns to launch non-destructive cargo.
At the time, countries were competing to get into space. In the days when space flight was new, there were also many accidents. “Today rocket launch failures are less common, but in the 1950s, less than half of the launches succeeded.” Not only that, but it was very expensive to build a rocket, and they did not have the reusable rockets that we have today. Bull believed that Canada could make money by making use of large canons to launch satellites.
From a BBC article on Bull:
“Low cost was the concept, at least,” explains Andrew Higgins, a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, Canada. “Rather than throwing away the first stage of a rocket, using a large gun for the first stage would enable this hardware to be reused and easily serviced.”
Bull was involved in Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) to work on the idea. HARP was a joint project between Canada and the US. The project was located in Barbados so test shells would land harmlessly in the ocean. Bull designed a series of special super-sonic shells named “Martlets”.
From an article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on Bull:
The Mark II Martlets were cylindrical finned projectiles, about eight inches wide and five feet six inches long. They weighed 475 pounds. Inside the barrel of the space-cannon, a Martlet was surrounded by a precisely machined wooden casing known as a "sabot." The sabot soaked up combustive energy as the projectile flew up the space-cannon's sixteen-inch, 118-ft long barrel. As it cleared the barrel, the sabot split and the precisely streamlined Martlet was off at over a mile per second. Each shot produced a huge explosion and a plume of fire gushing hundreds of feet into the sky.
The Martlets were scientific research craft. They were designed to carry payloads of metallic chaff, chemical smoke, or meteorological balloons. They sported telemetry antennas for tracing the flight.
By 1965, they had launched over 100 projectiles into the ionosphere. The following year the US Army used a HARP gun to fire a projectile 111 miles high. This was a record for the time. The project was shut down in 1967 because of critics in the Canadian government and the financial pressure of the Vietnam War on the US.
Other people had lost interest in superguns, so Bull started selling weapons to finance his supergun research. Bull started a company named Space Research Corporation. Using his knowledge of aerodynamics, Bull created the GC-45 howitzer and specially designed shells. These weapons had longer ranges than similar weapons on the market at the time.
Bull’s company worked with a number of countries at the time, including Israel, China, Chile, Taiwan, and South Africa. In 1977 and 1978, Bull sold weapons to South Africa at a time when the country was under sanctions. As a result, Bull was sent to prison for 6 months. After leaving prison, he continued to do business with South Africa and was “fined $55,000 for breaching the international code”. Because of this, he decided to stop doing business with the US and Canada.
A Man on His Own
After moving his business to Brussels, Bull was sought out by the Iraqi government. At the time, Saddam Hussein was the Iraqi defense secretary. He liked Bull’s work and asked him to help Iraq improve the weapons for their war with Iran. Bull helped improve the range of Iraq’s feared SCUD missiles.
Happy with the results of his work, the Iraqi government allowed Bull to work on his supergun. He started work on Project Babylon in 1988. The first step was Baby Babylon. It consisted of “a horizontally mounted 350mm barrel, 46 metres in length, weighing 102 tonnes. It was set on a hillside at a 45-degree angle.” Baby Babylon was expected to have a range of 750 km or 466 miles. The initial test showed positive results.
Having proven that his design worked Bull started working on “Big Babylon” “a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 1,510 tonnes, with a bore of one meter (39 inches) that would allow the firing of multi-stage rocket-assisted shells with a range of over 5,000 mi (8,000 km) or to launch 1,200 lb (540 kg) satellites into orbit”. Project Babylon’s ultimate goal was to build “three 350 mm Baby Babylon guns and two 1000 mm PC-2 Big Babylon guns”. “Big Babylon” would never be built.
Iraq didn’t have the facilities to manufacture the parts for Project Babylon, so they had to contract with European companies. Also, they had to be sneaky so these companies didn’t know they were making weaponry parts. One of the British steelworks companies, Walter Somers, was told that the steel tubes they were contracted to build were for the petroleum industry. However, they could not understand “why the 330-millimeter steel tubes they had been contracted to build were designed to cope with pressures 12 times those normally found in the petroleum industry.”
Bull used a Greek company to order a specially designed propellant from Belgian ammunition manufacturer Poudreries Reunies de Belgique. The Belgian company was told the propellant was bound for Jordan. A couple of years later, Poudreries Reunies de Belgique was purchased by “the British munitions company Astra Holdings”. The new directors noticed the suspicious “Jordanian” order and canceled it.
Assassination
On March 22, 1990, Gerald Bull was shot five times as he approached the door to his home in Brussels. There were immediate suspicions that it was a professional assassination because his keys were still in the door when the police arrived and his briefcase with $20,000 inside was untouched. Many suspect that Mosaad carried out the hit. Others think that the UK government was involved. No one was ever caught or prosecuted.
Legacy
Project Babylon died with Bull. He kept most of the information about his work in his head to keep it from being stolen. Multiple components for Big Babylon were seized in their countries of manufacture before they could be shipped to Iraq.
There is a debate whether these devices would be useful as weapons or not. The main problem is that they were immobile and vulnerable to attacks from the air. Also, they would have limited targeting options since they could not be moved, even firing missiles.
A high-ranking Iraqi defector named General Hussein Kamel al-Majeed said that Project Babylon was a space weapon. “Our scientists were seriously working on that…It was designed to explode a shell in space that would have sprayed a sticky material on the [spy] satellite and blinded it.”
Others believe that Saddam wanted to make Iraq an Arab space power. The Israels launched their first rocket into orbit in 1988. Bull told the Iraqis he could build an inexpensive launch platform that could put small satellites into orbit for $5,000 each. This would give Iraq prestige among the Arab community.
Why this Story is Cool?
Simple. Superguns are cool. Impractical, but cool.
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