We all did some crazy things in the 80s - But nothing quite as crazy as creating a sci-fi
space cannon of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein, the infamous former president and prime minister of Iraq, once dreamed of
creating a super gun, an unimaginably powerful weapon that would help Iraq conquer the Arab
world.
But where did he get such an idea?
How did he go about trying to create his super weapon?
And most importantly, did he succeed?
But the story doesn’t begin with Hussein.
In fact, it starts with the man Saddam turned to, the man who would help him develop a super
gun.
A man whose lifelong obsession with superguns had led him into madness and international
crime.
A man who had no idea that this fateful meeting would bring his life to a sad and mysterious
end.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Gerald Bull was a gifted Canadian academic and engineer.
He was born to an English-speaking father and a French-speaking mother in North Bay,
Ontario.
He was only three years old when his mother died, leaving him and his nine siblings alone
with their father.
Sadly, his father would abandon the family, leaving Bull to be raised away from his siblings
by an aunt and uncle.
In a way, Bull might as well have been an orphan, and it had a profound impact on him
as a boy.
He wanted people to like him, and when they didn’t, he was deeply hurt by the rejection.
He was a people pleaser so chronic that it might cause him to fall in with the wrong
crowd - though nobody could have anticipated what a terrible crowd Bull would find.
At 16, Bull was accepted into the new aeronautical engineering course at the University of Toronto.
He became Canada’s “Boy Rocket Scientist,” known for his creative flair and technical
prowess.
Oddly, his classmates and professors didn’t really see him as brilliant.
He didn’t stand out amongst his peers, and he graduated with average grades.
Still, at 22, he was one of the youngest students to earn a doctorate at the University of Toronto.
That was something of a claim to fame for the young man.
After graduating, he would go on to take a drafting job at A.V.
Roe Canada, a Canadian aircraft manufacturing company.
Around this time in his life, Bull had been approached by a German woman who was the daughter
of an engineer working on the Paris Gun Project during World War 1.
It was a top-secret legendary German super cannon.
This behemoth of a gun was first used on March 23, 1918.
They had fired it on the Place de la Republique.
Then, on March 29, the Germans hit the Church of St. Gervais in Paris.
They were able to kill 91 people and injure 100 more.
But it was too late for Germany.
The gun would not turn the tide of the war, and the weapon would be dismantled as an expensive
waste of time and resources.
The blueprints were sealed away and expected never to return.
Thanks to the German woman, Bull was given the unpublished manuscript from the Rausenberger
family archives, one that just so happened to pertain to the infamous German Super Gun.
It outlined the gun’s design and capabilities in tantalizing detail.
The moment Bull had been given these documents, an obsession was unlocked.
An obsession that would follow him until his dying day.
And we mean this literally: This visitor had sparked Bull’s lifelong mission and also
set his death into motion without even knowing it.
By the 1960s, Bull was working with the Canadian and United States governments to research
super gun technology.
His designs helped test supersonic flight without an expensive wind tunnel.
Engineers would fire projectiles short distances through the barrel of a large gun instead.
Bull spent so much of his career in government-funded weapons research.
He designed rockets and guns for warring countries, but he had hopes that went far beyond that.
He didn’t dream of war.
He wanted to use his designs to launch satellites instead of missiles.
In 1961, Bull worked on HARP, the High Altitude Research Project, for Canada and the United
States.
He focused on modifying ex-Navy guns to fire weather probes into sub-orbit and back down
again.
Sadly, his work would soon be completely derailed by the Vietnam War.
The war had been so costly and unpopular that they pulled the plug on his project.
It was officially canceled in 1967.
Bull hadn’t been able to get any objects into orbit, but this hadn’t deterred him.
If anything, it had him more excited about his ideas.
Through the work they had done, Bull felt it was possible to create a satellite-launching
super gun.
He could now envision a fully operational space gun on the horizon.
Rockets require so much energy to move, and the parts used to build their motors are expensive.
His plan for the super gun would minimize the need for fuel or expensive parts.
Bull knew that the HARP launch guns could reach 2 kilometers per second, which added
up to around 4473.87 miles per hour.
But Bull would soon be hit by another blow.
The world lost interest in superguns by the 1970s as technology and warfare splintered
off in different directions.
Bull hadn’t lost hope, but he would have to fund his dreams some other way.
In need of money, he would go to South Africa and illegally sell weapons to the South African
government.
Bull would develop his super gun on the side, using the money he raised through weapons
dealing.
He even created his own private company, the Space Research Corporation of Quebec.
It was through this company he would illegally sell weapons to South Africa and then launder
the profits into further research.
Sadly for him, Bull wouldn’t enjoy the fruits of his labor for long, as he was arrested
in South Africa in 1976.
He was charged with violating the United Nations arms embargo, and he spent six months in a
United States prison.
For a lot of people, this would have been the end of their career in arms dealing, but
Bull was obsessed, and no nation’s laws could stop him.
Rather than leave South Africa, when he was released, he continued to do business with
them.
The second time he was caught, he was fined $55,000 for international arms dealing.
None of this had the intended effect, of course.
He continued to plow ahead with his plans.
After this, Bull became fed up with the Canadian government.
He moved to Brussels, Belgium, to operate through a European company.
Around this time, as he continued to work, he became a darker person.
He started to alienate himself from the Western world; the sweet, kind man he’d once been
was devoured by his scientific obsession.
He would make his super gun - No matter what.
Iraq would make the first move.
In 1981, they contacted Bull because they needed him to design artillery for them.
Saddam Hussein was the country’s defense secretary, and he believed they needed weapons
for the Iraq-Iran war.
Hussein had become a fan of Bull’s work, and he felt Iraq needed his designs if they
were to ever get an advantage over their foes.
During this time, Iraq wasn’t seen as a threat to the West, and Saddam Hussein’s
name carried few of the dark connotations it does today.
Bull saw Hussein as a means to an end, and Hussein felt the same about Bull.
Hussein was a path for Bull to live out his dream, and, in return, Bull would help Hussein
become the leader of the Arab world.
The obsessive scientist was easily lured in by Hussein’s plan to create a space program
for Iraq.
Really, they were a perfect match.
Project Babylon, the first official space gun project, would begin in 1988 when the
Iraqi government gave Bull $25 million as a research budget.
There was a catch, of course.
Bull would have to continue working on artillery to get his super gun funding.
Naturally, Bull agreed.
And so Project Babylon took flight.
It would start as three super guns.
There were the two full-sized Big Babylon 1000mm caliber guns, and then there was Baby
Babylon, a prototype 350mm caliber gun.
The goal was to create Big Babylon, 511.81 feet (156 meters) in length with a one-meter
bore, weighing 1,510 tonnes.
It would have been mounted at a 45-degree angle on a hillside with no plans to ever
be able to transport it.
A lot of the details, such as velocity, can only be theorized since it would never come
to be.
It’s thought that Big Babylon might have been able to fire a 1322.77-pound (600 kilograms)
projectile across 621.37 miles (1,000 kilometers).
They would have been able to strike Kuwait and Iran from inside Iraq.
Bull knew that Iraq could use this technology to launch missiles.
He found ways to justify his work all the same.
He would tell himself that a super gun would be impractical to use in actual warfare.
Since the gun couldn’t be moved, it would limit the gun’s capacity to attack other
nations.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
Research marched on.
He also believed the weapon would be impossible to hide and, therefore, could have been easily
taken out by an air strike by an enemy country if things ever went too far.
Heck, the seismic tremors it would cause might deter Iraq from even using it offensively
in the first place.
It had a recoil force of around 27,000 tonnes, similar to seeing off a nuclear explosion.
But how confident could Bull really be?
It was possible Iraq could have used it for long-range attacks or to go after spy satellites.
There was no guarantee that Bull’s hunch about his invention’s impracticality as
a weapon was correct, but it’s what he would soothe himself with.
Perhaps he truly did believe it, or maybe he knew that it was a comforting fantasy.
What mattered to him was that he would see his vision through, no matter what.
There was a problem, though.
Big Babylon would require an enormous charge.
It would burn out quickly, and since it had such a long barrel, they would have to figure
out how to maintain the charge long enough.
Bull had complicated calculations ahead of him to fix the problem.
All that’s known is that the charges would look like anti-tank rounds.
The projectile would be housed in a lightweight casing, and it would fall away at the gun’s
muzzle.
Despite all of the work he had done over his life, Bull was never able to solve this problem.
In May of 1989, they would complete the 147.64-foot-long prototype gun, Baby Babylon, and then began
testing.
They would manufacture the components for Baby Babylon in England, Germany, France,
Switzerland, and Italy.
Maybe one day, Bull would have completed his research.
For all his hard work and obsession, it was possibly only a matter of time before he found
some solution.
He wasn’t the only one seeking it, that was for sure.
Around this time, in the late 1980s, there were other potential supergun experiments.
At the US Lawrence Livermore National Lab, scientist John Hunter had a background in
magnetic projectile weapons.
He was given a few million in funding to work on gas-powered guns.
They had even called the project Super Harp (or Sharp).
It was named in reference to Bull’s previous attempts when he still worked for the Canadian
and American governments.
But before Bull could find the answer, he would lose his life.
No one fully knows what happened on March 22, 1990.
Bull had exited his sixth-floor apartment in a Brussels suburb when he felt the searing
pain of five 7.65mm bullets being unleashed into his neck and back.
The two assassins who shot him would escape as Bull’s life faded.
Our unfortunate protagonist had been receiving anonymous telephone threats to stop working
on the Iraqi projects, but it didn’t stop him.
He had even visited Iraq shortly before his assassination.
It’s likely the Bull had some awareness that his days were numbered, or maybe he thought
he would be safe regardless.
He continued forward in spite of the threats, and it would cost him his life.
No one has been publicly identified as a suspect in the murder.
Naturally, it’s assumed that the assassins killed him due to his work for the Iraqi government.
Some believe it was the Israelis, while some think the blame lies on the Iraqis themselves.
Had it been the Iraqis, it would have been retribution for sources claiming Bull engaged
in financial double-dealing, taking advantage of his employers for his own ends.
There does seem to be a stronger argument for the Israeli government being behind Bull’s
death.
One anonymous senior military intelligence officer has confirmed the death was ordered
after Israel’s secret foreign service, Mossad, found evidence that Bull worked with Iraq
on weapons of mass destruction.
The Israeli government refuses to comment on the assassination.
So, it’s unlikely there will ever be any closure from the government on the death of
Gerald Bull.
It’s clear what could have motivated the Israeli government to take action.
Israel feared Bull would create a super gun with a 1,000mm muzzle that would fire shells
with chemical, biological, or atomic warheads.
They worried that Israel would eventually become a target, given their longstanding
tensions with the Arab world.
Everything began when that German woman gave Bull the information on the Paris Gun.
Israel knew he had access to those plans, and they worried what that could mean.
The Paris Gun had devastating effects on Paris, even if it hadn’t helped Germany win the
war.
It was the threat of something bigger and more powerful coming along, something capable
of attacking Israel, that may have pushed the agents of Mossad to act.
It was also not the only thing Bull had been studying.
Robert Turp, a retired major in MI10, the British technical intelligence service, mentioned
that he and Bull had spent hours discussing the design of the V-3.
Word had spread that Bull had reconstructed British reports of the V-3 cannon, a Nazi
super gun from World War II.
Hitler had it built on the northern French coast, hoping to fire from two large bunkers
in the Pas-de-Calais region.
They would attack London directly with it, bringing the British to their knees.
Fortunately for England, it was destroyed by Allied bombers before it could be used.
However, Germany did create two similar guns that would be used to attack Luxembourg from
December 1944 to February 1945.
They struck Luxembourg with 142 rounds, which would lead to a total of 10 dead, while 35
were wounded.
If Bull could create something larger and more powerful than that, what could the death
toll look like?
The past had fueled an understandable fear of what Hussein had in store for Bull’s
work.
Israel had feared Saddam had every intention of building a super gun for his arsenal.
Killing Bull was one way for Israel to ensure that Saddam Hussain would never get the super
gun he longed for.
And the assessment was correct.
When Bull died, the super gun died with him.
His obsession with the super gun had brought about his own demise.
Now, all that remains of the super gun is on permanent display at the Royal Armouries’s
collection at Fort Nelson, Hampshire.
Two huge steel pipes are bolted together and projected high into the air.
They’re big enough for a person to crawl through them.
Perhaps, at the close of this strange and tragic tale, we should all just be thankful
that the dreams of Saddam Hussein and Gerald Bull never did come true.
Now check out “Saddam Hussein’s Violent Emergence as Iraq’s Leader.”
Or watch this instead!