The Man Who Built A Gun To Shoot Space

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans uh,
and this is a podcast about the worst people in
all of history. And this week we are talking about
some very uh creative men who liked to design them
some weapons. Uh. My guests uh this episode as with
last episode, Uh, Carl Casarda from Enranged TV. Carl, how

(00:26):
are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I'm sitting here
contemplating my my future with a Maxim machine gun. Let's
let me teach me more about something that I probably
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

(00:48):
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

(01:08):
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

(01:30):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:35):
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,

(02:57):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:41):
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

(04:04):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:46):
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.

(05:06):
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.

(05:28):
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

(05:50):
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

(06:12):
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

(06:35):
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

(06:57):
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

(07:19):
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

(07:39):
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

(08:00):
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

(08:20):
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

(08:42):
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,

(09:04):
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.

(09:27):
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

(09:49):
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

(10:11):
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

(10:32):
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,

(10:53):
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

(11:15):
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

(11:36):
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

(11:57):
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

(12:20):
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,

(12:42):
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

(13:03):
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.

(13:26):
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

(13:48):
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

(14:10):
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,

(14:32):
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

(14:54):
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

(15:15):
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

(15:36):
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,

(15:58):
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,

(16:20):
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

(16:41):
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

(17:02):
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.

(17:23):
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

(17:44):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:27):
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

(18:50):
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

(19:11):
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,

(19:32):
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

(19:55):
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

(20:17):
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

(20:37):
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.

(20:58):
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

(21:20):
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

(21:40):
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

(22:03):
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,

(22:23):
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

(22:47):
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

(23:09):
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

(23:32):
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

(23:53):
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

(24:13):
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

(24:37):
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.

(24:59):
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

(25:21):
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

(25:42):
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,

(26:07):
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

(26:27):
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

(26:47):
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

(27:10):
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,

(27:33):
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.

(27:53):
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

(28:14):
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

(28:37):
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

(29:00):
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

(29:21):
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

(29:42):
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

(30:04):
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

(30:25):
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

(30:46):
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.

(31:07):
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

(31:27):
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

(31:49):
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

(32:10):
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

(32:31):
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

(32:52):
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,

(33:13):
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

(33:34):
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

(33:56):
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

(34:16):
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,

(34:37):
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

(35:00):
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

(35:22):
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.

(35:43):
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

(36:03):
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

(36:24):
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

(36:48):
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

(37:09):
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,

(37:29):
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

(37:50):
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,

(38:10):
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

(38:32):
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

(38:53):
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

(39:16):
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

(39:39):
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

(40:02):
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

(40:25):
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,

(40:49):
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

(41:10):
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

(41:32):
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.

(41:55):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:40):
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

(43:02):
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

(43:25):
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

(43:51):
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

(44:11):
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

(44:34):
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,

(44:54):
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

(45:15):
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

(45:39):
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

(46:00):
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,

(46:21):
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

(46:42):
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

(47:05):
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

(47:28):
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

(47:49):
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

(48:13):
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

(48:33):
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.

(48:56):
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

(49:17):
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

(49:39):
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

(50:00):
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

(50:24):
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

(50:44):
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,

(51:06):
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

(51:29):
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.

(51:52):
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

(52:14):
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.

(52:35):
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

(52:58):
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

(53:20):
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

(53:42):
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

(54:04):
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

(54:32):
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

(54:55):
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

(55:18):
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

(55:40):
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

(56:01):
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

(56:23):
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

(56:45):
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

(57:05):
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,

(57:27):
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,

(57:48):
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

(58:09):
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

(58:31):
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

(58:51):
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

(59:12):
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

(59:35):
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

(59:57):
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.

(01:00:17):
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.

(01:00:39):
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.

(01:01:03):
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

(01:01:24):
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

(01:01:45):
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

(01:02:05):
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

(01:02:28):
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,

(01:02:50):
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,

(01:03:11):
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.

(01:03:32):
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

(01:03:54):
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

(01:04:17):
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

(01:04:38):
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.

(01:04:59):
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,

(01:05:23):
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,

(01:05:45):
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,

(01:06:08):
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

(01:06:29):
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,

(01:06:50):
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

(01:07:12):
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

(01:07:35):
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

(01:07:57):
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,

(01:08:23):
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

(01:08:43):
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,

(01:09:08):
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,

(01:09:29):
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

(01:09:50):
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

(01:10:11):
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,

(01:10:32):
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

(01:10:52):
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

(01:11:14):
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

(01:11:35):
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

(01:11:56):
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

(01:12:18):
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

(01:12:38):
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

(01:13:00):
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

(01:13:20):
every episode. I don't. All right, we're donning nailed it.

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