The Man Who Built A Gun To Shoot Space

need in my life but I'm not aware of. Well, yeah, I mean this, this would this would be a little bit harder to the weapons we're talking about today, would be slightly harder to acquire than a maximum gun UM and require somewhat more space. UM. As a spoilier for where we're going, you will need a hill or a small mountain to properly use this UM. So you know, I don't know how much property you have, but but

maybe set like a good sized hill. Aside, um, you need about a thousand meters So, as we discussed last episode here in Maxim may be directly responsible for more deaths via his invention than any other arms designer in history. Now, our next subject was equally brilliant in his ability to design guns. He's probably better at it than here him was. He may be better at it than anybody was. Um. The fact that his creations killed fewer people is not

through lack of trying. Although his goal was never to make weapons of war. That was just kind of an un that was kind of a necessary asside to the thing he really wanted to do. The guy we're talking about today is Gerald Bull. And when I say guns here, we're talking about the big stuff like artillery pieces. We're not talking about anything you can fit in a jacket, you know. Um. Gerald Vincent Bull was born on March nine night in North Bay, Ontario. You may recognize this

as being part of Canada. And the fact that two of the three great gun designers in North American history were from nowhere near the south is a fact of some shame from my people. Um. Most Browning was born in what Utah? So yeah, still come on South, somebody figure something out. But I know that Gerald's father was George Toussaint Bull. He was a lawyer and he was He and his wife were very productive during the brief time that they were alive, spreading a lot of kids

out over the land. Ten children. Um. They were quite comfortable financially for a little while until about a year after Gerald was born when the stock market crashed. You know, n not a great year for anybody, really. George had taken out a bunch of loans for investments during the bull market, and he wound up broke when they came due. After the crash, the family had to move to Toronto

for work. Now, Gertrude Bull, Gerald's mother kept having kids, and she suffered severe complications after giving birth to her tenth child. So Gerald was kid number nine. Um. A couple of years later she has child number ten, Gordon, and she doesn't go great. She died is in April of nineteen thirty one, which sets uh Gerald's dad, George,

on a sharp decline. He becomes an alcoholic, He has a nervous breakdown, and he abandons his children and leaves them with his sister Laura, who dies almost immediately afterwards. So by the time Gerald is five, he has had he's been through the ringer. That's a rough set of cards to draw as a five year old child. Wow, yeah, you kind of wonder how that influences someone to the to their adulthood, right, I mean, yeah, losing your mother, you're essentially part of a litter. You know, brothers and

sisters have a litter. Yeah, you've got a litter. Your dad just fox right off. Your second mom dies, Like it's not great, No, it's not great. Yeah. Um, and we will talk a little bit about how this influences him. But definitely not a stable upbringing, right. Um, So George, his dad falls in love with somebody else, gets married, um, and does not take his children back. He's married in a more stable position. Instead, After his sister dies, he

gives up his kids to an assortment of relatives. He just kind of like splits them and then goes off and does his own thing. He's like, I don't want these kids around anymore. I'm trying to doing a new life. You get a kid, you get a kid, You get a kid. Everyone gets a kid. You know the rule. Your mom's dead. I ain't your dad anymore, said this ship. We got to find me another uterus destroy. Yeah, we don't get a ton of to tail about George Bull,

but he definitely sucks pretty bad. Um. Gerald winds up being raised largely by his older sister, Bernice Um and when he was nine or ten, he starts spending the summer with his aunt and uncle, who were well off and able to send him to an all boys Jesuit school. So he does have a large family who takes care

of them. He's kind of an orphan, but he's taken care of by his family who are comfortable enough that like he's not a financial burden to them, and they're they actually like put a lot of resources into him. So it is a rough childhood, it's not nearly as bad as it could be. Right, he doesn't wind up in an institution or something. Um. He has a loving family. His dad is just a massive piece of ship. So uh.

He starts doing better at this point once he gets to the Jesuit school and he shows an aptitude for engineering. He had a hobby of designing and building model airplanes out of balsa wood. Um, not like a kit for an airplane. Would just get raw wood and he would make his own planes and fly them. So Gerald graduates in nineteen forty four and he was accepted to Queen's University. His initial plan was to join the military as an officer,

but he found himself really really taken by engineering. He transferred to the University of Toronto, where he'd been accepted by their new aeronautical engineering school. This was an undergraduate program, and Gerald was sixteen years old when he starts it, right, so he is he is not just in college, he's in a graduate program for aeronautical engineering when he's a sixteen year old. Um, so, very very smart kid, right uh,

and also a very ambitious kid. But the uncertainty and abandonment in his childhood had left keen marks on him. Classmates noted that he could be difficult to work with and prone to anger, something that would be commented on by his peers for the rest of his life. Charles Murphy, who worked closely with Gerald as an adult, later told interviewers in a sense, he was an orphan and that

affected his personality a lot. He wanted people to like him, and he felt hurt and rejection, keenly and kind of like Maxim, He's one of these guys that when someone wrongs him or he sees someone is wrong, he never is able to let this ship go. Um. They're both men who take which I find interesting, who takes slights extremely personally and like cannot deal with with the idea

that somebody has wronged them. Uh Bulls program was funded by the Defense Research Board of Canada and his first project as a student was to build a supersonic wind tunnel. He used this as the basis for his nineteen forty nine Masters thesis, and by nineteen fifty he'd almost finished his pH d thesis, which is an insane rate of productivity for a young ecademic, going from Masters to pH d thesis in the space of about a year. UM.

He is a really smart kid. Now. That year, the d r B asked the school to provide them with an aerodynamicis for a missile project code named Velvet Glove. He proved to be exceptional at practical engineering, and gerald Bull was quickly selected to participate in this joint Canadian British Defense Department program to study artillery and develop new

methods for shooting people with big guns. The program that he worked with next had been started during World War two UM in Canada to keep British weapons developments out of German hands, and now that the Cold War was on, the purpose of the program switched to ensure that the Commonwealth had the most accurate artillery possible that they could use if things got hot again. He helped to design

some of the first segmented aluminum SABO rounds. He's like the guy who really in like is a heavy part of obviously it's teams, but he's one of the people who invents like the concept of a SABO round and

makes it actually effective. And that's when you have like a big smooth bore gun and there's basically rifling in this SABO thing that gets discarded as the shell travels out of the barrel, and it allows you to do things like later on they'll do stuff like the the art the artillery piece will almost be a rocket, and when the sabo is discarded, wings pop out or fins pop out that allow it to like stay more aerodynamic.

Like the fact that you have this that you build, this discarding SABO system allows you to do all sorts of stuff with with artillery rounds that people couldn't really do before. It will also enhance the capabilities of existing artillery because you're taking on existing smooth bore and by changing the projectile you're probably giving it higher accuracy and greater range. Yeah, that's exactly and that's exactly a big part of this is, you know, the militaries and whatnot

are always like, there's always budgetary concerns. We have all these big guns. The SABO allows us to massively upgrade their capacity and we don't have to actually make new fucking guns, um, which nobody really wants to deal with. Um So, yeah, he helps design some of these the first of these rounds. He also helps to design new methods for testing powerful artillery that's much more like the artillery they're making shoot so much further and faster than

it ever has. They have to invent new ways to decide to figure out how fast they're shooting it, right, Like, they didn't actually have the equipment to determine how fast are we firing these shells because they never needed to. So he's he's not just making the rounds. He's also helping to figure out how are we actually going to analyze and test this stuff, because that needs to be

invented right alongside it. Um. In nineteen fifty one, at age twenty one, he gets his PhD, becoming one of the youngest PhDs in the university's history to this day. UM So, life's pretty good for bolt during this period. On a fishing trip in the early fifties, he meets the daughter of a local doctor, Naomi Gilbert. The to start dating and then get married. In nineteen fifty four.

Her father gave the couple of house as their wedding gift, and the very next year, their first son, Philip, was born. Michelle followed soon after. Now Gerald was exceptional enough at what he did that in nineteen fifty three he received attention from McLean's magazine, which titled him Canada's boy rocket scientist. His cantankerous nature, though increasingly a aserted itself as a fundamentally pragmatic, experiment driven scientist. He expressed hatred for theoretical researchers,

who he called cocktail scientists. He also grew increasingly furious with red tape, which restricted the kind of weapons projects that he could embark on. So he's he really hates anyone who's not getting their hands dirty actually like making ship. He has no time at all for like theoretical physics or anything like that. He wants to go out and build things, and if you're not doing that, he thinks you're kind of full of ship. Well, that kind of smells like I'm the smartest guy in the room, sort

of simplex complex, does it not? Like all these other people are just holding me back. Get out of my way and watch what I can do. He's probably a narcissist, Like you can't diagnose someone based on this, but he he has in it and he's he's he's a genius. But he also has this extremely high opinion of himself and gets enraged whenever someone is like, no, we don't really want you to do that. I wonder, I mean,

I wonder. I don't think I'm not I'm not a psychiatrist, but I wonder how much that comes back to being sort of discarded as a child. Yeah, yeah, I really, I mean it's it's it's it's interesting to think about, like it's it must have had some sort of impact. Um, and yeah, he really he never is able to handle being told no. So an early example of both of these things came in n when Bull was working on a smooth bore gun that could fire explosive rounds at

four thousand, five d and fifty miles per hour. This would be the fastest and most accurate artillery piece ever made. Now to make his gun work. He had to design a special telemetry system to even collect data on how the weapon functioned. His plans to do this were considered impossible by staff at the organization he was working at, and several of them went to the mat to try

to stop Bull from moving forward. To thwart them, he sneakily moved his departments funding around, paying for the project under their noses, and it worked. Bull continued his work more or less without fanfare for the next decade, experimenting with anti ballistic missiles and radar, eventually impressing the director of the U S Army Research and Development Division enough that a model of one of Bull's guns was brought

to the States and test fired over the Atlantick. The US team had to use the fire control radar from a Nike Hercules missile to track the shells fired by Bulls gun, which reached altitudes of a hundred and thirty thousand feet. So this is like, this is a gun that shoots at such ranges and so quickly that you have to use like the radar systems on a fucking

missile to track the projectiles at fires. It's fascinating because like I was just kind of making a joke about being the smartest guy in the room, but he might legitimately have been. He's very smart. Yeah. Yeah, Like when we say he's making guns, he's making like like he's making like fantasy weapons like these are these are uh, extremely advanced weapon platforms. So at this point, yeah, he's

making guns that can basically fire into space. Like he's he's he's making weapons that can shoot projectiles damn near indoors. It sounds like something you'd read into Jules Verne novel. Yeah. Um, he must have like Jules Verne as a kid, and his work here was as much rocket science as it was anything like what Maxim and other men were doing

a generation or two earlier. Right, And so in like literally like a generation or two, we've gone from making a water cooled gun that that is recoil operated to I am shooting missiles into the into space. It is again just like a mark of how quickly things change. Now. It was at this point in the late nineteen fifties that Bull and his colleague and friend Gerald Murphy started

talking about doing something totally new with their cannons. Instead of just firing munitions, might it be possible to use them to launch aircraft. They started with model airplanes. And when I say model airplanes, scale models of airplanes one one scale models of airplanes that they are shooting out of cannons to see, like, can we launch planes this way? Um? One of the weapons one of the planes they launched through a cannon this way is a supersonic jet called

the Avro Arrow. US work yielded early results, and it actually revealed a flaw in like one of the stabilization systems in the Arrow because they were shooting it so quickly. That leads to this very important safety upgrade in the plane that makes it a lot safer to fly. So

there's immediate results to this. But the institute he's working at cancels the program immediately after like this, and he's enraged again, right, he wants to keep shooting planes out of guns, and the university is like, now we feel like that's all we need to know about shooting a plane out of a gun, like so we're gonna take your funding away. And he's livid, you know, in his eyes, these cocktail scientists have robbed him of a chance to do a thing he thought was cool. It does sound

like a lot of fun. It does sound it sounds as hell. Yeah, absolutely, I would have loved to get to hang out and just watch him shoot planes out of guns. That sounds neat. So in nineteen fifty seven, Russia does a spot nick, which we today see as rad but Americans and a lot of Canadians found terrifying at the time. And there's this whole mania over Well, now we gotta get a fucking satellite up there, right, this is this is also base race stuff. Everybody's probably

broadly familiar with this. Um So Gerald Bull takes this as an opportunity and he leaks a story to the press that Canada was about to put their own Sputnik type satellite into orbit by building a high velocity cannon into the nose of a red Stone missile. Now this was a complete lie, but he wanted he wanted to make this thing, so he figured, I leaked this to the press, there will be a frenzy in Canada for me to launch a satellite, and then I'll get to build this. And again this this is one of the

most insane ideas I've ever heard. He's talking about like a nuclear ballistic missile and you replace the explosive in it with a gun built into the front of the missile so that the missile shoots up into the sky and then the gun fires the satellite into space from the missile. So that's the second stage. It's a fucking insane idea he's and he's also like really incredibly playing

the media. It's really fascinating. Like he sees he's looking at this missile the size of a fucking building and goes, I bet I could stick a gun on that and that'd be pretty And if I put this out in the news and say that Canada's making it and they don't make it, it olympariss them, so now they have to make it. Well that was his hope. It doesn't

quite work out. So the leaked story was obviously a calculated act, but it causes an uproar in the Canadian government and the Prime Minister, a guy named deefend Baker, loudly denounces the idea as bogus to the press, so it does not work for him and heads rolled in Bull's office. But the hubbub also led to massive press interest in the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment or CARD,

which is where he was working at the time. Um and the subsequent A lot of the media coverage that comes out of this this leak and the around it focuses on guns that Gerald Bold had built, so he doesn't get his wish, he doesn't get to build his missile gun, but he gets a lot of interest in his the guns that he's already built, so it does kind of work out for him. By the end of the fifties, Bull was fed up with the timidity of

his superiors. In April of nineteen sixty one, he had an argument with one of his bosses who wanted him to complete paperwork before moving on to actually testing stuff. Bull asked his boss which is more important, paperwork or getting the work done, and his boss said, in this case, paperwork. So Bold responded, you want paperwork, I'll give you paperwork, and he wrote out his resignation right there on the spot. So he stops working for the University of the Canadian government.

This like big joint project. Um, yeah, you get a sense of like the kind of duty. I have to admit having a career in absolute security, I totally get that. I can't tell you how many change controled documents I never filled out right, I can't fucking handle that ship. I just wanted to make routers do stuff and make firewalls go. I didn't want to make paperwork go. I

get that, Yeah, I mean fuck paperwork. Like it's hard not to be on his side with some of this, just like, yeah, that that's I of course it would be frustrating if all you want to do is build guns into the into missiles and shoot them into space. If somebody wants you to fill out a fucking requisition form um, that's just useful time you had spend making

your space guns. So according to the book Wilderness of Mirrors a report, which is a book about Gerald Bull, a Canadian Army intelligence report on Bold that came out after his death later analyzed this incident that led to him quitting card and concluded his tempestuous nature and strong dislike for administration and red tape constantly led him into trouble with senior management. In this is true, and you get the feeling that, however understandable some of us may

have been, he was. He was an asshole to work with, like he was not an easy man to have as a colleague. Both transitioned pretty seamlessly to a professorship at McGill University, where he kept helped to carry out more experiments with aerodynamics and big guns. He and his wife actually purchased a two thousand acre plot of land on the Quebec Vermont border, which they donated to McGill University to use as a ballistics lab to like us as

a shooting range. Bull quickly received funding from Project HARP, which stood for High Altitude Research Project. It would a joint operation by the U. S Department of Defense in the Canadian equivalent, and the goal was to study the ballistics of re entry using large guns to fire projectiles at high speed and then watching those projectiles fall back to Earth. So, right, this is part of the space race.

They know we're gonna be launching shi up and we're gonna need some of it to come back without killing people in it. So we need to shoot a bunch of stuff up into the atmosphere and then let it fall and take data on like what happens when ship falls, because we haven't done that before, and the most efficient way they can think of to do that is these giant guns that Gerald Bull has been building. Because it's like, well, yeah, we don't need to we don't need to actually be

getting it into space. We just want to look at what's happening like aerodynamically as these things land. Let's have him shoot a bunch of stuff up and take notes on it. Are there bonus points of the projectiles land on a small Polynesian island? Um? I don't, it's not written about here. Um but maybe yeah maybe um? And and these are not like ballistic route like these are guns that could be used as artillery, but they're they're like little models and stuff that they're basically shooting and

monitoring at this point, um. And Bulls work here is very successful, and he's very supported by his boss, the head of McGill's engineering department, Donald more Dell. Other professors described quote second rate attempts at manipulation by both to secure more resources for his work. This was unnecessary, as more Dell believed in Bulls projects, but he was constantly

needled anyway in this war at him. So again, even when he's really supported by his boss, he can't like he's he never shows any gratitude for the stuff that he's getting. He's always just like no, no, I want more, I want more. I want to be able to do more. He's just you know, not a not a I mean he's he's also a very motivated guy, and so he's

just kind of has this um. Some of it's being very prickly and addict some of it's just he's got this very relentless belief in his projects and can't really stand the thought of not moving forward on them. Now, Bulls work for HARP was wildly successful. His cannons worked even better than intended for the people funding the research. The primary goal here was just a further the space race.

The guns existed to provide data on how different things re entered the atmosphere, but Gerald Bull didn't think of things that way. He believed his guns were the real stars of the show. And he starts to think about he starts to have more and more ideas around this, like, well, I don't really like the fact that the gun is just sort of a thing to study the ballistics of ship falling. I think the gun, I think these guns I'm building can really be like the basis of a

new of the of the whole space program. That's that's that's how he increasingly starts to think. Now, what happens next is influenced by something that happens in nineteen sixty five. And to tell that story, I'm gonna read a quote from a write up in The New York Times. A middle aged German woman arrived in Montreal to visit a relatively unknown scientist of McGill University Space Research Institute. The

scientist was Professor Jerald Bull, then thirty seven. The German woman who sought Bull out was the daughter of an engineer who had worked on the top secret Paris Gun project during the First World War. Developed by Krupp, the German steelmakers, the Paris Gun was an enormous howitzer with a range of seventy four miles, double that of any weapon then existing. First fired on the morning of March twenty third, nineteen eighteen, during Germany's Spring Offensive, it instantly

brought terror to Paris's Placid autrondisements. The first round hit the Palace of the Republic. The French aghast and mystified sent intelligence officers into the woods surrounding the city in search of a hidden German gun emplacement. On Good Friday, March, the guns scored a hit on the Church of Saint Gervas in central Paris, killing ninety one and injuring a hundred.

The Paris Gun came too late to turn the tide of the First World War in Germany's favor, but it was an incredible technical triumph for its inventor, Fritz Rausenberger, corrupts head of artillery development and production. Even with the relatively primitive technology of the time, the show reached a height of twenty six miles, an altitude not exceeded until Germany developed the V two rocket in World War Two. So this woman uh comes to Canada with papers from

Rousenburger's archives. So the Germans the Paris Gun never falls into Allied hands at the end of World War One. It's dismantled and like hidden or destroyed, and nobody knows how this thing was fucking built, right, because it's it's a military secret. It doesn't fall in anyone's hands. It's

kind of a mystery. The blueprints were lost forever, essentially, But this German woman has an unpublished manuscript from Rausenburger's family archives and it wasn't the original blueprint, but it had hard data on the gun's capabilities, and it's not information that bow is able to reverse engineer the gun from this and rebuild it via computer model, so he actually gets effectively the plans for the Paris Gun by this. I guess this woman who's just like, well, he's he's

building the biggest guns anyone's building. Uh, And I think my, my, uh, my ancestor Felix would would want him to have these plants. It's I'm a big fan of giant guns. I hear you're a fan of giant guns. Why don't you give you some of the secret information so you could build a giant ass gun. Yeah, it's really kind of a weird, Like, I want to know more about this lady who just like is take to buy this quest to help this man build the biggest gun effort. It's such a strange

thing to what to do. But I'm gonna quote again from The New York Times about what happens next. At that moment, the obsession was born that would dominate Bull's life and determine his death. Bull realized that if the projectile and the huge gun was a powered rocket, its range could be increased dramatically. With the backing of the United States Army, the Canadian Department of Defense, production in

McGill University. He established a test site on the island of Barbados and set to work on the High Altitude Research Project. By welding together to sixteen inch guns that had been put in storage by the U. S. Navy, Bull created a huge gun, thirty six meters long with a diameter of four hundred and twenty four millimeters. It remains the longest working gun ever built. So he is he is the man who's made the biggest gun, at least the longest gun. I don't even know what I mean.

It's wild. I can totally see why he was going down this path. And the concept of instead of just using a rocket from the surface to get to space, I mean making a rocket giving it its boost by just a general ballistic boost with a gun is pretty amazing idea. It is, And he is a weapons designer here, but he's his goal is not to make a weapon the weapon. His goal is, like I think the gun

should be a platform for space exploration. Um. So again, nothing like bad that he's done here, Like even within the context of like, yeah, it's wild that he's got like the plans for this German apocalypse canon, um, but he's using it because he wants to shoot stuff into space, which I would say is a broadly noble aim wanting to shoot stuff. I mean there's always like the whole Dick measuring of the Cold War, but like it's cool to put stuff in space. It's interesting to think about this.

You've got that, You've got the Paris gun being used in this instance, and the V two rocket ultimately in von Braun, Yeah, the Saturn five that gets us to the moon, right, I mean that's that's two different instances of these German weapons of war being turned into space exploration ideas. Yeah, it's interesting that, like he we get Bull, a gun that was made basically so that we could shell random civilian structures in Paris to scare the French, winds up becoming the basis of a system to shoot

satellites into space. Like that's that is really strange, um, but I'd make sense, you know, like obviously, if you can shoot a shell seventy four miles, you're not all that far from being able to put something into space. You're well on your way at least, right, Like, yeah, and I believe the V two was the first thing to actually ever make it into space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yes, the German arms industry complicated, complicated thing to think about, a lot of good, a lot of bad. Speaking have

a lot of good, a lot of bad. Break is heavily supported by the German arms industry. Sophie, this podcast uh huh, yeah we are. We are entirely supported by the German munitions industry. So go pick up a uh something from car. Just find some sort of car arm by it or one of those submarines the Germans keep selling the Egyptians for some reason. Get one of those. Explain why this podcast is as hard as crystall That's exactly right. That's what everyone says about our podcast. We're

the first people anyone said that about. Anyway, here's ads Ah, We're back. So Gerald Bowl at this point has built the longest gun anyone still has ever built, I guess because there's not really any need for like if you could shoot a thing into space. You've kind of made the biggest gun anyone needs to make. There's not a lot of of of point to going bigger at that point.

At that stage, so as the project neared its close, Bull felt he'd perfected plans for a gun launched three stage rocket with flipout fins using the SABO technology he'd helped work on that could put a small, functional satellite into orbit. He was extremely excited by this idea, As his son Philip later recalled, he thought HARP would be a big advancement for Canada and aeronautical engineering. They were already putting small probes into space. It was the drive

of his life to be working on that project. He was alone, it was his project. It came from his brains, and it was functioning. It worked, and so this is like the high point of his life. But it doesn't last long because on June thirtieth, nineteen sixty seven, the Canadian government stops funding HARP. Their justification is that they didn't like the idea that their space program would be so closely associated with military hardware. They find it distasteful

that their space program involves like gigantic guns. Right. Um, they don't like the idea. That's one reason. Another reason is that, um, they're they're they're moving towards rockets, right. The vast majority of scientists working in the US in Canada on the space race are all pretty much an agreement that rockets are the way to get shipped into space without breaking it. Um. And you know, bull is kind of his his attitude is like, well, no, we

should do it with gigantic guns. And he's basically the only guy on team giant guns for the space race, right, so obviously he does not win that argument. Um. And who knows what would have been better? Right, Like it worked out more or less, So I'm not gonna backseat rocket scientist. Interesting to note the US had no such qualms about the origins of their technology. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah, and I don't I don't like that was one of

the reasons that like they gave him. I don't know how much I about leave any government would like give a shit about that, But I don't think of governments as being basically that altruistic. So that's odd. Yeah, I mean maybe it was like maybe there was some pr concern because he's using some of his technology, is this giant Paris gun, which is doesn't have a great history,

you know. Um, but yeah, uh so right, he the rocket scientists kind of went out over the gun scientists, who are basically just Gerald bull Um and The New York Times in their write up, adds that quote. Bull later admitted that personality clashes had aggravated his budgetary problems. Arrogance was his trademark, and he had made few friends among his government backers. He frequently referred to bureaucrats as morons and the lowest form of life on Earth. The

abrupt termination of HARP devastated Bull. He was out in the wilderness, his dream of recreating the Paris guns stillborn. The Cocktail scientists had beaten him, but Bull was determined to get his revenge, and an epilog to the book, called Studies of Ultra Performance HARP Systems, he sketched out plans for an extraordinary new weapon, a launcher thirty two inches in diameter that could blast a tw pound payload

six hundred miles into space. I'm sure this is going to take a darker turn, but up until now, his disdain for pace for work and his desire to prove this technology with the ultimate goal of launching very endearing. It's actually I'm kind of digging the guy at the moment. I'm kind of waiting for the bomb to drop. Yeah, it's about too but it is like it is, there is something noble about like this man just wanted to build a gun that could shoot stuff into space. And

I mean that's a noble goal in itself. When you think at the Space Race, I mean, we knew this was needed to be done. It's it's it's also a pretty cool life, Ambishop. And frankly, if he had gotten it done sooner, maybe we wouldn't have seen would have put Elon Musk into a different line of business. Yeah, we'd be just making cannons to shoot rich people into space. So Bull decided he was done with bureaucrats and cocktail

scientists forever. He used his savings and his wife's ample family money to form his own company, the Space Research Corporation of Quebec. This was modeled after the institute he'd worked for at McGill, but it would be private and not as subject to the whims of government officials. Since Harp had been killed, the equipment built for it was being sold for basically nothing, so Bull's new company buys all of this, including the Barbados gun in the test area,

for basically nothing. They also get a twenty thousand acre site near Quebec. Most of their funding comes from contracts by the U. S. Army UM or US military, who are not interested in Bull's satellite goals, but are interested in his ability to make big, funk up guns um and his pitch to them is basically like, I built the biggest gun ever, want to see if I can

make a bigger one. Um. And Niois is actually not all that interested in his guns, but as we talked about earlier, they're interested in better artillery shells for their existing guns. Um, and they want Bull to make them nuclear capable artillery shells with a top range of twenty five miles, which is fucking nuts. Wanting to shoot a nuke at someone twenty miles away with the field gun is absolutely mad cap. Like you can start driving in the opposite direction and have a remote detonator to set

it off, a remote trigger. Yeah, Gerald, who wants you to make a suicide? And and for our boys in Europe, just something that will kill everybody around? What's the kill So we're gonna launch this what's the kill radius? Fifty mile? Oh? This sounds like a great plan. Yeah cool? Um Yeah, this is like the early seventies, so you have to

assume a lot of cocaine is involved at this point. Um. So Operation Nuke Bullets is a big hit and even non nuclear versions of the shells are sold end mass to Israel in nineteen seventy three for counter battery fire because they were getting outraged by Soviet artillery and a number of engagements they had, and these new shells allow them to take the range advantage back in a number

of their conflicts. So the U S. Defense Establishment goes very gaga for Bulls bullets, which had made the U S. M one oh seven the most valuable field gun on the face of the earth. Money came pouring in, and the United States was grateful enough that Bastard's pot alumni, Berry Goldwater, the then Senator from Arizona, pushed forward a bill making Gerald Bull retroactively a US citizen for the last ten years. Now, that's interesting. Goldwater shows up in

such interesting places over and over again. Yeah, that's the real weird one for him to be it. And the reason they give Gerald Bull like basically his citizenship accounts as if he's been a citizen for ten years. It's it's security clearance thing. They want to be able to give him a higher security clearance because of the work that he's doing. But there's like requirements about how long

you had to be a US citizen. He's one of I think three people who have ever had this done, unless you were a Nazi, and then you just get straight lined right in. Well, yeah, we don't talk about that so much. That doesn't go up in Congress. You know, it's different. Yeah, the Space Research Corporation was doing pretty well by most people standards at this point. They've got about eleven million dollars in US defense contracts, which is quite a lot of money at the time, but Bull

is still disappointed by their rate of growth. From the Washington Post quote and two competitions, his revolutionary hundred and fifty five millimeter shell design outshot the U. S. Armies in cannon system hands down, according to knowledgeable sources, but the army spurned his system and stuck with its own

less powerful guns. So they want his shells. They have things they want him to do for them, but he wants to make really big guns and sell them, and the U. S. Armies like, no, we don't really, we don't want to buy a whole new set of artillery. Like, we're happy that you've made the ones we have work a lot better. We don't. We're not really on board with this ship. And again he never forgives the United States for not wanting to buy his big stupid cannons.

Um now, he'll keep taking their money, but this like really enrages him, so he works at a deal with a Belgian ammunition manufacturer to create a European subsidiary of his company, funded by an injection of their investment cash.

This money allowed Gerald Bold to do what he did best, designed new, really fucking big cannons, and his latest invention was the g C Gun Canadian, a hundred and fifty five millimeter howitzer that could fire a shell with twice the throw weight of any of the biggest guns used at the time. It outranges all of the existing field artillery in the world by a significant margin. The New

York Times rights quote a triumph of military engineering. The g C forty five vindicated Bulls belief in his own genius. He took his revenge by selling it to the highest bidder That turned out to be South Africa, then fighting a costly war against Soviet backed Angolan and Cuban forces on the savannahs of Angola, and in desperate need of a new long range artillery weapon restricted by the United Nations, arms embargo, the South African regimes set out to acquire

the g C forty five technology illegally. At first, South Africa approached Space Research Corporation to provide fifty five thousand extended range shells for its existing artillery. The US helps the deal along with the with the when the Office of Munitions Control waived the requirement to obtain an export license for what we're termed as rough steel forgings two unidentified gun barrels. The g C forty five test models were shipped out with the shells, so this is very illegal.

So what happens is he gets the u US to approve him selling them better shells, and he ships out pieces of these GC forty five guns of a prototype to the South Africans. At the same time in the U S is very aware about this, but it's all kept on the download because you're not allowed to sell South African new military technology because they're using it in brutal colonial wars. UH with a deep racist bent. I have to assume that the US government at that point

eyebawling that security clearance they gave him pretty warily. Oh no, no, they're on board with this because South Africa's anti communist. This is very illegal, but he's he they are, they know exactly what's going on. They're helping make this happen. But it's also technically illegal, right, Like it's one of these.

George Gerald's son Michael Um later would say about his father's understanding of the arrangement that he was quote led to believe it was the thing to do, that the US had a passive policy to more or less favor these type of things in order to save the last bastion of capitalism in Africa. So it's very illegal, and no one ever says we're making this legal. They're just like, hey, if you just do this, it's not going to be

a problem. We got you. We got you, buddy. Just like, just just get the biggest guns possible to the most racist country in the world, so many of them that you can ship over um, and by god, he does. In nineteen seventy seven, the South African government's Arms Division buys a which I think is called arms Core by a steak in the Space Research Corporation, which came with a license to manufacture the g C forty five, which

they'd already received parts to copy. Soon South Africa was marketing their gun as the G five, a product of their home grown arms industry and absolutely not a violation of international law. So they're like, we made a cannon that's really good on our own. We just popped us out of nothing. We just figured this out all on our own, pulled out a little, you know, sheet of paper at the local pub and drew on it with

some crayons, and boom, here we go. Can build a real big gun all on our own, just us southcot. I mean, that's that's our South African ingenuity right there, right, So this works out for a while, works great for the South Africans because again they were being very badly as as Israel had been. They were being like horribly outraged by better Soviet artillery. And once they've got the G five, like fuck it, Like again, it's the best field gun in the world, right, Like nothing really measures

up to encounter battery fire. Um. So, unfortunately for Bull, in nineteen eighty, the story about his little cannon caper goes public. The Washington Post writes quote when press reports later revealed that the munitions had gone to South Africa despite a US trade embargo, The Customs Service began probing src Bowl enlisted Trudeau, who's an American general who had once headed Army intelligence, and Richard Bissell, former deputy director of the CIA, to take his case to the highest

levels of the Carter administration. Within a few months, Lawrence Curtis, the customs agent who headed the Bull probe, found that his ambitious plans for wide ranging indictments of numerous individuals and firms and three countries for arms export crimes had

come unraveled. Bull and one other individual were allowed to plead to reduced charges, a move that resolved the case quickly, but also eliminated any possibility that a trial could produce potentially embarrassing revelations about any involvement of US agencies with

Bulls munitions exports. I was totally surprised, very disappointed and bewildered, says Curtis, and Curtis quits not that long after this um now the House Subcommittee on Africa subsequently discovers that the States O MC had been told of the Bull South Africa scheme three years before the shipments were reported publicly and had done nothing. The reponderance of evidence was that through the CIA introductions, the United States was turning

a blind eye, recalls Subcommittee chairman Howard Wolp. The United States government was totally negligent in enforcing American law. So again, this is like the CIA is heavily involved, Like they we absolutely approve of this until it gets discovered, and then it's like this, Yeah, you gotta fall in your sword a little bit, buddy, Um, but we'll make sure

the investigation doesn't get that far. And you just get kind of a slap on the wrist, you know, like you're gonna have to take one for the team here, but we're not going to let them actually fully investigate your company or what's happened. So that it's such a great example of how these American agencies work, right, are many many government agencies work the actual supposed will of the country or the law of the country's irrelevant to the agency, and they really run as a rogue state

within a state. Yeah, and and that's like exactly what happens here. And they try to promise Bull like, hey, if you just play ball with this, it's not going to be that bad, um, and they wind up being a little wrong. So so Bull pleads guilty to one count of smuggling thirty thousand shells, two cannon barrels, and a radar van to South Africa without a license. Now you would think that would be a pretty serious crime.

I think if I were to smuggle thirty thousand high explosive shells to any country, I would probably get in a lot of trouble. Um, that would be my guess. The federal prosecutors recommend no jail time. Well it was against a communist, right, yeah, it was the healthy was to fight communists. Um. And it's actually this is a

rare case. The judge in this, as I guess, kind of rad because he puts Bull away for six months because it's up to him, right, so he is able to like the Feds are trying to give Bull no time at all, and this judge is like, oh, fuck that ship, like you have to do some fucking time, like like fuck you man, um. And so Bull actually does go to jail for six months, which he's fucking vivid.

This makes him so angry at the United States at this and like he's just enraged, and it is like it's weird because like obviously no sympathy for a man who gets in trouble smuggling arms to the apartheid South African government, right like fuck that, fuck you. But also he did get screwed over, right like he was just doing what the army and the CIA wanted him to do. It did teach him a hard lesson about how the

US government actually functions with its allies. Yeah. And it's one of those things, like, you know, we talk about how nice Jimmy Carter's post presidency thing is, Like the administration does everything they can to get this guy off because they're fine with it. Everyone's fine with it except for this one judge. So good on you, judge for doing something. I wonder what happened to that judge. Did he like wake up dead one day? Probably had a bad fishing trip. This was the period in which there

were more consequences for making the CIA angry. Um. You know who else makes the CIA angry? Nest Lee, Yeah, they do that. Nestle's intelligence arm does now significantly outrange the CIA. Um. It's it's really they come from behind victory for the Nestle Corporation, our primary sponsor. AUH. And we're back. So when we last left off, our buddy Gerald Bowl, he's been kind of fucked over. He also totally deserved to do time for smuggling guns to South Africa.

But also he's not the one who probably should have gotten the worst penalty for that. Probably a bunch of CIA dudes who should have been punished for that, and a bunch of other stuff. So Bull is very angry. Um, and uh, it's it's it's it's just kind of a fucked up situation. True to form, he goes on the war path against his former employer and like spends a lot of time in the media ship talking the United

States and like particularly our level of weapons development. He tells a Canadian journalist quote, the US has obsolete conventional weapons and no morale in their armed forces. They couldn't defeat Tim bucktoo in a fight. And this is not long after the end of the Vietnam War. So he's like, he's also not not far off, you know, kind of poured a little salt into the wound. Yeah, bulls US and Canadian businesses had gone broke as a result of

the whole scandal, but his Belgian operations were still humming along. Now, furious at both Canada in the United States, he moved to Brussels, and started making money the only way he knew how, by selling really fucking big guns. He designed a new howitzer based off of the g C forty five for Austria, and he made a cool five million selling them. The plans both told the Austrians, Hey, you guys are gonna be making this cannon your your your

arms industry at home. There's not a whole lot of You don't need a whole lot of guns for the Austrian army. You might want to consider selling them. And by the way, I think I know a guy who's in the market for some really big guns. Little dude you might have heard of named Saddam Hussein. Yeah. Baby, Our favorite romance novelist is in the game, a story about a man who wanted to build the biggest gun ever. Would of course involve Iraq at some point. It is

the seventies, so his guns. The Austrians start making a shipload of bulls guns and sending them to Jordan, who then sells them to it. Well, they're being sold to Iraq, but kind of by way of Jordan's so that the Austrians can pretend that's selling to Jordan. Because you can't really sell guns to Iraq right now, because Saddam Hussein was a little bit of an international pariah because he had just invaded Iran and started this horrible one of

the great blood best in the twentieth century. So it's kind of dicey selling guns to Saddam right now, so they have to hide it yet again. Here's the Washington Post quote. According to a still classified Austrian report, Saddam, whose war with Iran had bogged down, met with the Austrian Interior Minister in April two and demanded to know where are our guns? Can't you speed up delivery? We

require them urgently. Vest Alpine was Austria's largest state owned industry, but facing slumping sales and layoffs, it made a risky secret decision to violate neutral Austria's ban on selling weapons to belligerents, and in the next few years sold bulls cannons not only to Iraq but also to Iran. Today that the two former Austrian chancellors and various other cabinet ministers have become the subject of the largest criminal investigations

in Austrian history. Documents and records in the vest Alpine sale of two g h in forty five to Iran indicate that the Reagan administration, pursuing its tilt towards Iraq in the Iran Iraq War, quietly eased the sale of guns to Iraq, but sought to prevent the Austrians from

selling bulls guns to Iran. Now, this was an unusual a piece of moral consistency from the Reagan administration, because they absolutely sell guns to the Iranians too, Like they have no problem selling weapons to the Iranians, but they do briefly try to stop bowl. Um what better way to make profit when you sell meat grinders than to

also sell the meat? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um. The CIA actually sits down with the Austrian ambassador and shows him, like ci a satellite photos of these artillery pieces in an Iranian training center, and there are some like token efforts made to stop for their trade, but Iran gets

like two hundred of these guns. Bulls business with China was doing gangbusters now too, so he also starts through the CIA selling guns to China because the CIA has a vested interest in China having artillery that can outrage Soviet artillery because the Chinese and the Soviets are having all sorts of fucking kerfuffles right now, like border kerfuffles, and we're kind of this is after Nixon goes to China. We're very much tilting like towards China, especially as like

an anti Soviet sort of thing. So the CIA is very bullish on the idea of China getting their hands on some of these gigantic, fucking bull cannons um and China loves this guy. Uh. They invite him to a test range in Manchuria in nineteen eighty three, and his guides in China showed him that they had collected every academic paper he published over the course of his career going back to the fifties. They told him they wanted his help to aid armsmaker Narenko in producing a full

line of his hundred and fifty five millimeter canons. Now they understood that they were dealing with a guy who had a massive ego, and they provide him with food, drinks, and flattery. He even has his photo taken with Dan Jao Ping and was with Dan Jao Ping and was invited to teach a course at Nanjing University, which he did. So they're very much like, oh, we get what kind of man you are, we will, we will, we will make you as happy as possible because we want very

large guns. We would like the biggest guns you can make us. Please. Now, there's a little bit of a problem here, because in order to sell this technology, or at least his knowledge of how to make it, to China, there's a munitions control license, right, like you have to There's a bunch of things you have to do to sell weapons to China if the weapon technology is of

US origin. And Bull is a US citizen now, but he's also a Canadian citizen, and he gets his friend true Daw, this army general former head of Intelligence, and his CIA buddies to argue that since he's Canadian, the weapons are not of US origin and thus no export license is necessary. Um, And the State Department is like, this is not a very good justification. But the CIA is again like, na, no, no, no, let this ship happen. We want to get these guys the biggest guns we

can get them. In nineteen eighty four, this story broke when a customs agent, acting off of a tip, searched Bull at an airport and found as signed twenty five million dollar arms contract with China in his suitcase. Maybe it don't take that one with you. Well, you couldn't fit the cannon in your suitcase, you can certainly fit the contract. Yeah, just keep it as his keeping, as giant international crime contract in his suitcase as he walks

through security. Um, so there's a grand jury investigation and it looks again like Bull is about to go away for arms dealing. But again the CIA steps in and they squashed the case, which dies completely. He doesn't even go to trial at this point, like they just put an end to this because they really want China to

get these guns. And in fact, in nine six, the Pentagon actually steps in directly to help China complete their hundred and fifty five millimeter cannon production line designed by Bull, The Washington Post reports quote according to a US defense consultant involved in the project, the Army issued a US funded foreign military sales contract to a California firm to provide China with a one hundred and fifty five millimeter

artillery fuse manufacturing line. Initially, I was surprised, this consultant said, I thought Narenko only made a hundred and thirties smaller guns, So why were they building hundred and fifty five millimeter fuses when they didn't have a hundred and fifty fives while the US government knew they were building one prior to nine six. Barely a year later, said the consultant in Israeli intelligence sources, Narenko had made its first sale of the so called W A C. Twenty one bowl

designed guns to Iraq. According to a person associated with Bull's work in Iraq, the scientists soon caught the attention of Camille Hussain, an influential cousin and son in law of Saddam, with a proposal that Bull, Narenko and a Spanish firm build a huge two hundred and three millimeters self propelled howitzer for Iraq. It's fascinating to me that even when he's helping China build these guns, they still keep winding up in Saddam's army. All everything flows to Saddam.

Who's saying in this period, if you're making big guns, they are winding up in Saddam's armory at some points like Yo, dog, I heard about this thing called the pair scun I kind of want they around gun. Can you help me with this? I would like to shoot to run with a giant cannon from Baghdad Police. Um. And yeah. So so Bull works with Narenko and a Spanish company and they make this massive two hundred and

three millimeter howitzer for the Iraqi military. There's a prototype of this stupidly huge gun called the owl Foul that was produced and shown off at an arm show in Baghdad. And Saddam is over the moon about this. If you know anything about our man, Saddam, motherfucker loved his guns. Um literally got an education by threatening his principle at gunpoint. Was was a big fan of big guns. Um, and

he is enthralled by Bull. Um the finally Bull has found a guy who's like anything you want to make, man, as long as it's a real big gun. Like I I'm I'm on board. Can you gold play one of these? I kind of can you go play one of these fuckers? Son? Carry it aro out. So in Night, Saddam Hussein signs a contract with Gerald Bolt produce more normal artillery. So now Bull is just working directly with the Iraqi government. So he signs his contract to make you more hundred

and fifty fives and two oh three's. But he also in the contract is included something else. He finally has a contract to make the gun of his dreams. See, Saddam was an ambitious man, and he wanted to start his own space program. Now, if you've ever interface with any relics of the old Bathist government or talked to a single Iraqi who lived under that government, the idea that Saddam would have had a successful space program is um a fun proposition. I think a lot of things

would have burst in in re entry um. But Bull was confident that his genius was enough to overcome the fact that Saddam Hussein was terrible at running Iraq. From the BBC quote, the Iraqi government paid Bull twenty million dollars to begin Project Babylon, the first true space gun project, on the condition that he continued to work on their artillery.

Project Babylon began life as three super guns, too full sized Big Babylon one thousand millimeter caliber guns, and a prototype three hundred and fifty millimeter gun called Baby Babylon. The full size Big Babylon barrel would have been a hundred and fifty six meters in length with a one meter bore. In total, it would have weighed fift hundred and ten tons, far too big to be transportable, and so instead would have been mounted at a forty five

degree angle on a hillside. The absolute biggest gun anyone has ever thought to build. Yeah, like that, the a hundred and fifty six meter long barrel, a thousand millimeter like Jesus Christ. It's really hard to wrap your head around that size. Honestly, when you think about it, when you really put that into context, it's done the skies

of a skyscraper, right yeah. Um. Each shot would have used nine tons of especially designed propellant um, and using this propellant, Big Babylon would have been theoretically capable of shooting a six gram projectile across a thousand kilometers of distance, putting Kuwait and Iran well within striking distance from inside of Iraq. Alternatively, the gun could have been used to launch a two thousand kilogram rocket assisted projectile carrying a

two kilogram satellite. Now, had it been completed, Big Babylon probably would have been a really low cost way to launch satellites of a certain size. Right now, NASA estimates it costs about twenty two dollars per kilogram to put something into orbit. Gerald's gun would have cost about sevent d dollars per kilogram, over and over again. The concept

doesn't sound it seems it makes sense the idea. Yeah, and and like Saddam probably if he had not been quite the guy that he was um and he had actually had this thing built, he probably could have made

good money on it, you know. Like the problem is that the Iraqi government under Saddam was and and today there was so much corruption that I don't know how much I think they would have actually been able to like get this going, but they were able to, like, like, it's not really that much more complicated than than than sucking oil out of the earth and selling it. So like I think theoretically this could have been a really

significant industry for Iraq. Like, if they had actually built this thing, they could have made a lot of money shooting satellites into space very very cheaply. They would have literally been they would have literally been the little guy's satellite launching platform. They could have democratized satellite launch. Yeah, and it's interesting to think if he hadn't done some of the especially like hadn't done some of the the aggressive things that he had done, or and and was

asked to do in some cases by the CIA. If Iraq had built this thing and started launching cheap satellites and we had gotten to like the nineties and the Internet era, and there had been fucking Iraq willing to put a satellite into space for goddamn nothing, and for anybody, maybe a really interesting set of changes to like what happens on the Internet, Like who the funk knows where

that could have gone. Yeah, it's starling sooner um. Now, of course Saddam Hussein was Saddam Hussein, and everyone who found out about the supergun immediately assumed he was going to use it to shoot at people, um, because and it's the kind of thing. Maybe he is Saddam Hussein.

He does a lot of shooting at people. He's also it's a bad weapon, Like it's people who will talk about like was he planning to use as a weapon will point out like it's one of the worst things you can imagine as a weapon system because planes exist, Right, maybe he could have like shot at Iran with it, and Iraq had air had, you know, at least during points in the war air superiority. But like if he had thought to like fire and Israel or even Kuwait, like,

you could blow this thing up very easily. It's not. It can't defend itself. It cannot be hidden, It is extremely obvious where it's firing from, and it can't really move like it's not a good weapons system. Um So, I kind of I'm kind of the opinion that yet, yeah, he might not have wanted it as a weapon. He

might have wanted to like shoot ship into space. Um And that was when people who would like in converse stations with their weapons designers, they would be like, well, are you worried that he's going to use this to like shoot whatever other country? Geraldill be like, well, why, it would just be throwing your gun away. It's gonna

get bombed and it'll be useless then. Um so. And it is one of those things I should probably talk about what the recoil on this thing would have been, because it is not possible to fire without the entire world noticing. The recoil force from shooting this gun once would have totaled twenty seven thousand tons, which is equivalent to a small nuclear blast. Shooting this thing would have been a seismic event detectable in every country on Earth like it. It's hard to overstate what a big fucking

canon this would have been. But you know what if it wasn't the cannon itself to be used as a weapon, but what if it was to shoot weapons into space? I mean that that's that is the thing, and that's actually what one of the one one of Saddam Hussein's members of government argues that that was the purpose. It wasn't meant to be used as like field artillery. So I'm like, what years are we talking right now? This is a yeah, this is like the eight I mean

we're talking to Star Wars area. Yeah, I mean so it makes sense yeah, um and in general, Hussein Camel al Magi, a former head of a RACKS weapons development program, later said quote, it was meant for a long for long range attack and also to blind spy satellites. 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 satellite and blinded it. And that's that does seem like maybe more plausible. It's a glue

gun from cash. He was paid a big glue gun. He's made of these They're going to shoot the German shells up that glue all the piece seventeens together, and they followed the earth. Just Saddam, who's saying, like drunk at one in the morning watching a Spiderman cartoon and getting on the forum. I have an idea or read cass like, this is a good idea. You can just glue the satelleite together and they'll fall to the earth.

It's very funny. I don't know how much I believe what Hussein Camel al Magite is saying, because he's one of a number of guys who defects from Saddam's government to Jordan to work with the u N. And like, some of those guys were telling truth about something, but they were also all liars who had been part of like the Baptist administration, had been fine with Saddam until they pissed him off and thought that they were going to get killed, at which point they fled and you know,

turned on him in order to get a better deal themselves. Like none of them are trustworthy people, is what I will say about all of these. There's a number of these generals who like defect some of like the bullshit we get during the second invasion of Iraq is because these guys who defect from the Iraqi government and make these very lurid claims about Iraqi weapons systems that are not true. I'm not convinced Saddam actually wanted to use this his weapon at all. He's not a dumb guy.

He does make some dumb calls, but I think that, like, he's probably probably thinking, like, we can make a funkload of money with this thing. You might have legitimately just wanted to be part of the space race. Yeah, it would have been cool. Yeah, Um, he was that kind of dude. I kind of think he might have not had violent intent with this thing. He might have just wanted to get make a shipload of money. Um, who knows. And May of nineteen nine, Baby Babylon, a forty five

meter long prototype, was finished, finished and mounted on a hillside. Meanwhile, parts for the big guns started being made in Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy. Once again, this was all extremely illegal. You're not allowed to sell Saddam like new weapons systems.

You are certainly not allowed to build him a cannon that could shoot space like that is very against the law, so they're hiding all of this is like industrial equipment for like reservoirs and ship like, Oh, we need these big tubes for some like civil engineering projects, so we can have them made in the UK that the British don't know these tubes are meaning to be a fucking gun barrel, though of course they do know because none of this they don't keep this a secret very well.

So this gun gets under construction like five different countries and it's actually coming together. Gerald bulls the dream of his entire life of decades. He has the backing, he has the place to do it, has the technology. He is going to make his super gun. But his good luck doesn't last Carl, because on March two, nineteen ninety Gerald Bull suffered a significant setback. He was shot three times in the back of the head with a silenced pistol outside of his apartment in Brussels. That tends to

put a hitch in your playoff. Yeah, that's really gonna that that'll that'll that'll really interrupt your your your weapon design goals. Very few gun designers have continued to work after being shot three times in the back of the head with a silence pistol. I gotta say, the minute you told me that the first thing that popped on my head. And I don't know the story, so I'm curious to where this is going to go. But the minute I heard that, I thought Massad. That's what everyone thinks, right,

that that is the number one assumed culprit um. There are no witnesses obviously, right, which is also makes you think massade because they're pretty good at killing people. Um, no one has ever been charged with his murder um. Whatever kind of suppressory they were using on the gun was good enough that like nobody even hears this, they find him later. You know what's in thinking about that, as the Massad was known for using suppress pretty good chance. Yea.

I have not found direct information on what caliber he was shot with, but I would not be surprised. That said, there are some other possibilities. When police arrive at the scene, they find his key in the door in a brief case with twenty dollars in cash, so everyone knows immediately like this is not a robbery, right, And it may even be that like they made sure to leave cash on him to let people know like this is as a message to other people, like this was not a robbery.

He he was making this kind of ship for Saddam, and that's not okay. If you don't want to get shot in the back of the head, don't make fucking guns for Saddam Hussein. UM would not be surprised that if if it is the Massad, that would be very within kind of the Massad's operating principles. Um. Now. And it's interesting because the people who suspect a Massad the most reasonable expectation is not because he was building them a super gun, but because he was also working to

improve Iraqi ballistic missiles. Like they were worried about the scuds. Basically, they didn't care about this. They recognized to the big cannon is not a great weapons system. Um. They're worried that he's going to make the scuds more accurate, and he's Saddam's gonna you know, shell Tel Aviv again or whatever. Um. But really it's also worth noting the Massada is the what most people assume it could have been, literally anyone. The CIA has a tone of reasons to want this

guy dead, right, so does UK intelligence. He's building his gun in the UK South African intelligence has a lot of reason to want this guy dead at this point. Um, two weeks after his death, UK customs seized parts of the supergun before they could leave ports, So there's even an argument to be made that like maybe this is a British operation, right, they find out what he's doing, that he's doing it with like their manufacturers, they kill him and they seize his gun. Um and yeah, who knows,

We have no idea who killed him. Massad is probably like the smart money, but he really he had piste off basically everyone with the capacity to carry off a hit. So it could have been might have been fucking Iraq. Maybe he had some sort of falling out with Saddam. You know, they had an argument over the Dinny table one night and that was the end of up. Yeah, he was definitely. You gotta say one thing about Gerald Bull. He gave a lot of people reasons to want him dead.

It's like, I'm trying to understand the moral of the story. Is it is? It is the moral the story? You should not necessarily be a a moral arms dealer, weapons designer, or is the moral of the story. Follow your dreams and you'll get chipped in the back of the head three times with a suppress pointy two, I think, which

both of them are morals. Probably the wisest thing if you have a dream is to maybe, even if you have a beautiful dream, you should not follow that dream to the point that leads you to make artillery for apartheid South Africa and a space gun for Saddam. Who's saying, yeah, maybe at that point you should have a moment of self revelation to go. You know what, Maybe I'm the baddie when you keep sitting down in meetings with Saddam hus saying you should probably thinking Donna Rumsfeld should have

come to this conclusion too. I might be making some bad steps here. Yeah, these are some odd life is. How did I get here today? I don't feel good about consistently being in a room with this. And Yeah, shortly after Gerald's assassination, Iraq invades Kuwait and the dream of the super gun dies at least for now. You know, we have the plans, we have the technology. We could build the biggest gun anyone has ever built and use it to shoot satellites or goo into space. I like

the idea. I think goo and space has been a completely unexplored reality. I think we as Americans need something to bind us together again, and maybe we could build I don't know what, the Mountaineer. We build a big gun on the side of Mountaineer and we use it to shoot the fucking moon. Well, I would think if we were going to do it in true American style, we would do it like Mount Rushmore. We would take something that was on a reservation and destroy indigenous location,

the Holy Mountain of sorts. That coil is going to destroy everything sacred around. So if you want, if you want to do it right, we have to do it someplace that's on Indigenous land, and that would be of the truly American way. We could call it colonialism the gun, Yeah, and then we can use it to shoot settlers onto Mars, which we then funk up. That's true. You know. One life goal, I guess is to live long enough to be around to experience or learn about the first gunfight

on Mars, because would get us there sooner. Yeah, we could. We could shoot people and guns onto Mars with our big gun that we've built to shoot things into Mars. All things come back to guns and giant foulic symbols. Don't they. Yeah, it is a pretty like It is definitely not surprising that Saddam hears about this man's dream and says, I will absolutely build that big stupid gun in my country. You can, you can put it anywhere. I want the biggest, longest, largest thing to shoot goo

with ever made. Yeah. How would a big long gun to shoot go into space? It is kind of like the fundamental desire of every dictator. Yeah, I want you to build me a big penis with a twenty seven thousand tons of recoil that can shoot all over my enemy's satellites, which are basically their eyes. You know. Saddam just wanted to give a facial to all of the countries that had angered. We just we just came to the true conclusion. It was the Iraqi space bookaky gun. Yeah,

the Iraki space Bokaki cannon. Uh fucking hell um. All right, Carl, Well, that is the episode that That's what I got for you. This was a real treat, I have to I mean, I had heard about space cannons before, but I did not know all of these stories. And I mean I had also been obviously very familiar with Maxim's work, but not maximumself and the parallels between this are quite interesting really when you think about people that are so driven

by their goal that they lose the morality in the process. Yeah, and it is one of those things when you talk about the inevitability of such things. Yeah, when you have people that are that dedicated, like no one was ever. The only way to stop Gerald Bull from making bigger and bigger guns was to shoot him three times in the back of the head. Like he was. He wasn't

he was. He was so driven to keep making those things, um, which is is fascinating and it is also like, yeah, it also brings you back to that thought I mean those thought experiments that never actually can truly be explored besides just thinking about them because we don't know what the reality would be. But what if he had been given the opportunity to make his space gun without turning into this international arms designer and dealer. You know, if if if Canada said, you know what, go for it,

make that big thing. We want to launch Google into space and he had just gone down that path, Yeah, perhaps, I mean it could have changed everything. What if what if Hitler had sold his paintings, right, I mean, who

the funk knows it could have changed the world. Yeah, I mean I think the main thing that would if he built his big space gun in Canada, motherfucker would probably be a billionaire because it seems like it would have worked and it would have been that Like, that's just an insane amount of money if you can make it that much cheaper to put satellites in space. Not only that, what would what would the butterfly effect be for the technology of could now launch into space low cost?

I mean that could have changed things in a very humanitarian way. Yeah, it is really interesting to like think about. And again, I am kind of from a from an alternative science fiction standpoint, fascinated the possibility of like you have the Internet boom and Iraq is letting anybody with two grand put a tiny satellite into space? What what does that do? Like? What how is that different? How

was like piracy different? If the Pirate Bay could just like launch satellites into space for a few grand apiece, and like what does that change about like the late nineties, early two thousand's and all of these Like it is kind of a fascinating question um to think about. It could have been pretty weird or Saddam would have done something chetty, who knows. I would like to think it would have done something amazing. It would have brought great

technology to the world. But in reality we probably would have ended up with four chan in space. Yeah, because it again it is Saddam Hussein, So you shouldn't expect things to go to wealth like he is the guy that he is. He probably he may have just sold it all to the Disney Corporation in order to shut down any ability to broadcast non Disney products. We could live in a global dictatorship of Disney enforced by Saddam's space penis. Well, we're kind of close to that already.

It's just two different mechanisms. Look Disney again, it trends enforces right like, even without the space gun, Disney found a way, Life finds a way. The corporate oligarchy finds a way with or without a gun to shoot go into space with. I do want to see that fucking thing fire nine tons of propellant, like I wonder, I mean, honestly, legitimately, just firing that thing, how much like damage in the surrounding environment would happen from the concussion is hard to fathom.

You would have and that every possible living thing away from it, right, I mean you, you would have to have like a couple of miles clear um, because it's just too funny. You can't be near that thing. It's not like hearing protection doesn't even matter at that point. It will fucking liquefy you. This will make when the MythBusters destroyed a bunch of windows firing one of their little things in one of their filming episodes, seem very

minor by comparison. Yeah, it is. It is a very it's it's yeah, could have made a pretty good water slide too. Um. All right, Carl, that's our episode. You got any pluggables to plug? I am my normal pluggable. I run in range dot tv. You can find me

on multiple different distribution points. One of my big things that I did long ago is demonetize my work because I believe it's completely fewer supported, therefore no sponsors in the overlords and UH got a lot of hype once when I decided to publish my content on porn hubs. So at any rate, if you want to see gun content that's a little bit outside of the norm, you can find me an range dot tv. Excellent. Well check that out. Yeah, so my book is now available for

preorder After the Revolution, my novel. You can pre order it with an autographed book plate in the front of the book right now at a k press dot org slash after the Revolution with a datch, or if you just google a K Press after the Revolution and you'll find it. That's the easy way to do it. Just google after the Revolution, a K Press, pre order my book. It'll come signed. Um, so that's pretty cool. And yeah, that's gonna do it for us here at Bombing the

Bastards for today, Sophie. We're not going to bind the lives. Absolutely not. I'm not doing it either. I do it every episode. I don't. All right, we're donning nailed it.