Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans uh,
Speaker 1: and this is a podcast about the worst people in
Speaker 1: all of history. And this week we are talking about
Speaker 1: some very uh creative men who liked to design them
Speaker 1: some weapons. Uh. My guests uh this episode as with
Speaker 1: last episode, Uh, Carl Casarda from Enranged TV. Carl, how
Speaker 1: are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I'm sitting here
Speaker 1: contemplating my my future with a Maxim machine gun. Let's
Speaker 1: let me teach me more about something that I probably
Speaker 1: need in my life but I'm not aware of. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this, this would this would be a little
Speaker 1: bit harder to the weapons we're talking about today, would
Speaker 1: be slightly harder to acquire than a maximum gun UM
Speaker 1: and require somewhat more space. UM. As a spoilier for
Speaker 1: where we're going, you will need a hill or a
Speaker 1: small mountain to properly use this UM. So you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how much property you have, but but
Speaker 1: maybe set like a good sized hill. Aside, um, you
Speaker 1: need about a thousand meters So, as we discussed last
Speaker 1: episode here in Maxim may be directly responsible for more
Speaker 1: deaths via his invention than any other arms designer in history. Now,
Speaker 1: our next subject was equally brilliant in his ability to
Speaker 1: design guns. He's probably better at it than here him was.
Speaker 1: He may be better at it than anybody was. Um.
Speaker 1: The fact that his creations killed fewer people is not
Speaker 1: through lack of trying. Although his goal was never to
Speaker 1: make weapons of war. That was just kind of an
Speaker 1: un that was kind of a necessary asside to the
Speaker 1: thing he really wanted to do. The guy we're talking
Speaker 1: about today is Gerald Bull. And when I say guns here,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the big stuff like artillery pieces. We're
Speaker 1: not talking about anything you can fit in a jacket,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. Gerald Vincent Bull was born on March
Speaker 1: nine night in North Bay, Ontario. You may recognize this
Speaker 1: as being part of Canada. And the fact that two
Speaker 1: of the three great gun designers in North American history
Speaker 1: were from nowhere near the south is a fact of
Speaker 1: some shame from my people. Um. Most Browning was born
Speaker 1: in what Utah? So yeah, still come on South, somebody
Speaker 1: figure something out. But I know that Gerald's father was
Speaker 1: George Toussaint Bull. He was a lawyer and he was
Speaker 1: He and his wife were very productive during the brief
Speaker 1: time that they were alive, spreading a lot of kids
Speaker 1: out over the land. Ten children. Um. They were quite
Speaker 1: comfortable financially for a little while until about a year
Speaker 1: after Gerald was born when the stock market crashed. You know,
Speaker 1: n not a great year for anybody, really. George had
Speaker 1: taken out a bunch of loans for investments during the
Speaker 1: bull market, and he wound up broke when they came due.
Speaker 1: After the crash, the family had to move to Toronto
Speaker 1: for work. Now, Gertrude Bull, Gerald's mother kept having kids,
Speaker 1: and she suffered severe complications after giving birth to her
Speaker 1: tenth child. So Gerald was kid number nine. Um. A
Speaker 1: couple of years later she has child number ten, Gordon,
Speaker 1: and she doesn't go great. She died is in April
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty one, which sets uh Gerald's dad, George,
Speaker 1: on a sharp decline. He becomes an alcoholic, He has
Speaker 1: a nervous breakdown, and he abandons his children and leaves
Speaker 1: them with his sister Laura, who dies almost immediately afterwards.
Speaker 1: So by the time Gerald is five, he has had
Speaker 1: he's been through the ringer. That's a rough set of
Speaker 1: cards to draw as a five year old child. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: you kind of wonder how that influences someone to the
Speaker 1: to their adulthood, right, I mean, yeah, losing your mother,
Speaker 1: you're essentially part of a litter. You know, brothers and
Speaker 1: sisters have a litter. Yeah, you've got a litter. Your
Speaker 1: dad just fox right off. Your second mom dies, Like
Speaker 1: it's not great, No, it's not great. Yeah. Um, and
Speaker 1: we will talk a little bit about how this influences him.
Speaker 1: But definitely not a stable upbringing, right. Um, So George,
Speaker 1: his dad falls in love with somebody else, gets married, um,
Speaker 1: and does not take his children back. He's married in
Speaker 1: a more stable position. Instead, After his sister dies, he
Speaker 1: gives up his kids to an assortment of relatives. He
Speaker 1: just kind of like splits them and then goes off
Speaker 1: and does his own thing. He's like, I don't want
Speaker 1: these kids around anymore. I'm trying to doing a new life.
Speaker 1: You get a kid, you get a kid, You get
Speaker 1: a kid. Everyone gets a kid. You know the rule.
Speaker 1: Your mom's dead. I ain't your dad anymore, said this ship.
Speaker 1: We got to find me another uterus destroy. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: don't get a ton of to tail about George Bull,
Speaker 1: but he definitely sucks pretty bad. Um. Gerald winds up
Speaker 1: being raised largely by his older sister, Bernice Um and
Speaker 1: when he was nine or ten, he starts spending the
Speaker 1: summer with his aunt and uncle, who were well off
Speaker 1: and able to send him to an all boys Jesuit school.
Speaker 1: So he does have a large family who takes care
Speaker 1: of them. He's kind of an orphan, but he's taken
Speaker 1: care of by his family who are comfortable enough that
Speaker 1: like he's not a financial burden to them, and they're
Speaker 1: they actually like put a lot of resources into him.
Speaker 1: So it is a rough childhood, it's not nearly as
Speaker 1: bad as it could be. Right, he doesn't wind up
Speaker 1: in an institution or something. Um. He has a loving family.
Speaker 1: His dad is just a massive piece of ship. So uh.
Speaker 1: He starts doing better at this point once he gets
Speaker 1: to the Jesuit school and he shows an aptitude for engineering.
Speaker 1: He had a hobby of designing and building model airplanes
Speaker 1: out of balsa wood. Um, not like a kit for
Speaker 1: an airplane. Would just get raw wood and he would
Speaker 1: make his own planes and fly them. So Gerald graduates
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty four and he was accepted to Queen's University.
Speaker 1: His initial plan was to join the military as an officer,
Speaker 1: but he found himself really really taken by engineering. He
Speaker 1: transferred to the University of Toronto, where he'd been accepted
Speaker 1: by their new aeronautical engineering school. This was an undergraduate program,
Speaker 1: and Gerald was sixteen years old when he starts it, right,
Speaker 1: so he is he is not just in college, he's
Speaker 1: in a graduate program for aeronautical engineering when he's a
Speaker 1: sixteen year old. Um, so, very very smart kid, right uh,
Speaker 1: and also a very ambitious kid. But the uncertainty and
Speaker 1: abandonment in his childhood had left keen marks on him.
Speaker 1: Classmates noted that he could be difficult to work with
Speaker 1: and prone to anger, something that would be commented on
Speaker 1: by his peers for the rest of his life. Charles Murphy,
Speaker 1: who worked closely with Gerald as an adult, later told
Speaker 1: interviewers in a sense, he was an orphan and that
Speaker 1: affected his personality a lot. He wanted people to like him,
Speaker 1: and he felt hurt and rejection, keenly and kind of
Speaker 1: like Maxim, He's one of these guys that when someone
Speaker 1: wrongs him or he sees someone is wrong, he never
Speaker 1: is able to let this ship go. Um. They're both
Speaker 1: men who take which I find interesting, who takes slights
Speaker 1: extremely personally and like cannot deal with with the idea
Speaker 1: that somebody has wronged them. Uh Bulls program was funded
Speaker 1: by the Defense Research Board of Canada and his first
Speaker 1: project as a student was to build a supersonic wind tunnel.
Speaker 1: He used this as the basis for his nineteen forty
Speaker 1: nine Masters thesis, and by nineteen fifty he'd almost finished
Speaker 1: his pH d thesis, which is an insane rate of
Speaker 1: productivity for a young ecademic, going from Masters to pH
Speaker 1: d thesis in the space of about a year. UM.
Speaker 1: He is a really smart kid. Now. That year, the
Speaker 1: d r B asked the school to provide them with
Speaker 1: an aerodynamicis for a missile project code named Velvet Glove.
Speaker 1: He proved to be exceptional at practical engineering, and gerald
Speaker 1: Bull was quickly selected to participate in this joint Canadian
Speaker 1: British Defense Department program to study artillery and develop new
Speaker 1: methods for shooting people with big guns. The program that
Speaker 1: he worked with next had been started during World War
Speaker 1: two UM in Canada to keep British weapons developments out
Speaker 1: of German hands, and now that the Cold War was on,
Speaker 1: the purpose of the program switched to ensure that the
Speaker 1: Commonwealth had the most accurate artillery possible that they could
Speaker 1: use if things got hot again. He helped to design
Speaker 1: some of the first segmented aluminum SABO rounds. He's like
Speaker 1: the guy who really in like is a heavy part
Speaker 1: of obviously it's teams, but he's one of the people
Speaker 1: who invents like the concept of a SABO round and
Speaker 1: makes it actually effective. And that's when you have like
Speaker 1: a big smooth bore gun and there's basically rifling in
Speaker 1: this SABO thing that gets discarded as the shell travels
Speaker 1: out of the barrel, and it allows you to do
Speaker 1: things like later on they'll do stuff like the the
Speaker 1: art the artillery piece will almost be a rocket, and
Speaker 1: when the sabo is discarded, wings pop out or fins
Speaker 1: pop out that allow it to like stay more aerodynamic.
Speaker 1: Like the fact that you have this that you build,
Speaker 1: this discarding SABO system allows you to do all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff with with artillery rounds that people couldn't really
Speaker 1: do before. It will also enhance the capabilities of existing
Speaker 1: artillery because you're taking on existing smooth bore and by
Speaker 1: changing the projectile you're probably giving it higher accuracy and
Speaker 1: greater range. Yeah, that's exactly and that's exactly a big
Speaker 1: part of this is, you know, the militaries and whatnot
Speaker 1: are always like, there's always budgetary concerns. We have all
Speaker 1: these big guns. The SABO allows us to massively upgrade
Speaker 1: their capacity and we don't have to actually make new
Speaker 1: fucking guns, um, which nobody really wants to deal with.
Speaker 1: Um So, yeah, he helps design some of these the
Speaker 1: first of these rounds. He also helps to design new
Speaker 1: methods for testing powerful artillery that's much more like the
Speaker 1: artillery they're making shoot so much further and faster than
Speaker 1: it ever has. They have to invent new ways to
Speaker 1: decide to figure out how fast they're shooting it, right, Like,
Speaker 1: they didn't actually have the equipment to determine how fast
Speaker 1: are we firing these shells because they never needed to.
Speaker 1: So he's he's not just making the rounds. He's also
Speaker 1: helping to figure out how are we actually going to
Speaker 1: analyze and test this stuff, because that needs to be
Speaker 1: invented right alongside it. Um. In nineteen fifty one, at
Speaker 1: age twenty one, he gets his PhD, becoming one of
Speaker 1: the youngest PhDs in the university's history to this day.
Speaker 1: UM So, life's pretty good for bolt during this period.
Speaker 1: On a fishing trip in the early fifties, he meets
Speaker 1: the daughter of a local doctor, Naomi Gilbert. The to
Speaker 1: start dating and then get married. In nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: Her father gave the couple of house as their wedding gift,
Speaker 1: and the very next year, their first son, Philip, was born.
Speaker 1: Michelle followed soon after. Now Gerald was exceptional enough at
Speaker 1: what he did that in nineteen fifty three he received
Speaker 1: attention from McLean's magazine, which titled him Canada's boy rocket scientist.
Speaker 1: His cantankerous nature, though increasingly a aserted itself as a
Speaker 1: fundamentally pragmatic, experiment driven scientist. He expressed hatred for theoretical researchers,
Speaker 1: who he called cocktail scientists. He also grew increasingly furious
Speaker 1: with red tape, which restricted the kind of weapons projects
Speaker 1: that he could embark on. So he's he really hates
Speaker 1: anyone who's not getting their hands dirty actually like making ship.
Speaker 1: He has no time at all for like theoretical physics
Speaker 1: or anything like that. He wants to go out and
Speaker 1: build things, and if you're not doing that, he thinks
Speaker 1: you're kind of full of ship. Well, that kind of
Speaker 1: smells like I'm the smartest guy in the room, sort
Speaker 1: of simplex complex, does it not? Like all these other
Speaker 1: people are just holding me back. Get out of my
Speaker 1: way and watch what I can do. He's probably a narcissist,
Speaker 1: Like you can't diagnose someone based on this, but he
Speaker 1: he has in it and he's he's he's a genius.
Speaker 1: But he also has this extremely high opinion of himself
Speaker 1: and gets enraged whenever someone is like, no, we don't
Speaker 1: really want you to do that. I wonder, I mean,
Speaker 1: I wonder. I don't think I'm not I'm not a psychiatrist,
Speaker 1: but I wonder how much that comes back to being
Speaker 1: sort of discarded as a child. Yeah, yeah, I really,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's it's it's interesting to think about,
Speaker 1: like it's it must have had some sort of impact. Um,
Speaker 1: and yeah, he really he never is able to handle
Speaker 1: being told no. So an early example of both of
Speaker 1: these things came in n when Bull was working on
Speaker 1: a smooth bore gun that could fire explosive rounds at
Speaker 1: four thousand, five d and fifty miles per hour. This
Speaker 1: would be the fastest and most accurate artillery piece ever made.
Speaker 1: Now to make his gun work. He had to design
Speaker 1: a special telemetry system to even collect data on how
Speaker 1: the weapon functioned. His plans to do this were considered
Speaker 1: impossible by staff at the organization he was working at,
Speaker 1: and several of them went to the mat to try
Speaker 1: to stop Bull from moving forward. To thwart them, he
Speaker 1: sneakily moved his departments funding around, paying for the project
Speaker 1: under their noses, and it worked. Bull continued his work
Speaker 1: more or less without fanfare for the next decade, experimenting
Speaker 1: with anti ballistic missiles and radar, eventually impressing the director
Speaker 1: of the U S Army Research and Development Division enough
Speaker 1: that a model of one of Bull's guns was brought
Speaker 1: to the States and test fired over the Atlantick. The
Speaker 1: US team had to use the fire control radar from
Speaker 1: a Nike Hercules missile to track the shells fired by
Speaker 1: Bulls gun, which reached altitudes of a hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: thousand feet. So this is like, this is a gun
Speaker 1: that shoots at such ranges and so quickly that you
Speaker 1: have to use like the radar systems on a fucking
Speaker 1: missile to track the projectiles at fires. It's fascinating because
Speaker 1: like I was just kind of making a joke about
Speaker 1: being the smartest guy in the room, but he might
Speaker 1: legitimately have been. He's very smart. Yeah. Yeah, Like when
Speaker 1: we say he's making guns, he's making like like he's
Speaker 1: making like fantasy weapons like these are these are uh,
Speaker 1: extremely advanced weapon platforms. So at this point, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: making guns that can basically fire into space. Like he's
Speaker 1: he's he's making weapons that can shoot projectiles damn near indoors.
Speaker 1: It sounds like something you'd read into Jules Verne novel. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: he must have like Jules Verne as a kid, and
Speaker 1: his work here was as much rocket science as it
Speaker 1: was anything like what Maxim and other men were doing
Speaker 1: a generation or two earlier. Right, And so in like
Speaker 1: literally like a generation or two, we've gone from making
Speaker 1: a water cooled gun that that is recoil operated to
Speaker 1: I am shooting missiles into the into space. It is
Speaker 1: again just like a mark of how quickly things change. Now.
Speaker 1: It was at this point in the late nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: that Bull and his colleague and friend Gerald Murphy started
Speaker 1: talking about doing something totally new with their cannons. Instead
Speaker 1: of just firing munitions, might it be possible to use
Speaker 1: them to launch aircraft. They started with model airplanes. And
Speaker 1: when I say model airplanes, scale models of airplanes one
Speaker 1: one scale models of airplanes that they are shooting out
Speaker 1: of cannons to see, like, can we launch planes this way? Um?
Speaker 1: One of the weapons one of the planes they launched
Speaker 1: through a cannon this way is a supersonic jet called
Speaker 1: the Avro Arrow. US work yielded early results, and it
Speaker 1: actually revealed a flaw in like one of the stabilization
Speaker 1: systems in the Arrow because they were shooting it so quickly.
Speaker 1: That leads to this very important safety upgrade in the
Speaker 1: plane that makes it a lot safer to fly. So
Speaker 1: there's immediate results to this. But the institute he's working
Speaker 1: at cancels the program immediately after like this, and he's
Speaker 1: enraged again, right, he wants to keep shooting planes out
Speaker 1: of guns, and the university is like, now we feel
Speaker 1: like that's all we need to know about shooting a
Speaker 1: plane out of a gun, like so we're gonna take
Speaker 1: your funding away. And he's livid, you know, in his eyes,
Speaker 1: these cocktail scientists have robbed him of a chance to
Speaker 1: do a thing he thought was cool. It does sound
Speaker 1: like a lot of fun. It does sound it sounds
Speaker 1: as hell. Yeah, absolutely, I would have loved to get
Speaker 1: to hang out and just watch him shoot planes out
Speaker 1: of guns. That sounds neat. So in nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: Russia does a spot nick, which we today see as
Speaker 1: rad but Americans and a lot of Canadians found terrifying
Speaker 1: at the time. And there's this whole mania over Well,
Speaker 1: now we gotta get a fucking satellite up there, right,
Speaker 1: this is this is also base race stuff. Everybody's probably
Speaker 1: broadly familiar with this. Um So Gerald Bull takes this
Speaker 1: as an opportunity and he leaks a story to the
Speaker 1: press that Canada was about to put their own Sputnik
Speaker 1: type satellite into orbit by building a high velocity cannon
Speaker 1: into the nose of a red Stone missile. Now this
Speaker 1: was a complete lie, but he wanted he wanted to
Speaker 1: make this thing, so he figured, I leaked this to
Speaker 1: the press, there will be a frenzy in Canada for
Speaker 1: me to launch a satellite, and then I'll get to
Speaker 1: build this. And again this this is one of the
Speaker 1: most insane ideas I've ever heard. He's talking about like
Speaker 1: a nuclear ballistic missile and you replace the explosive in
Speaker 1: it with a gun built into the front of the
Speaker 1: missile so that the missile shoots up into the sky
Speaker 1: and then the gun fires the satellite into space from
Speaker 1: the missile. So that's the second stage. It's a fucking
Speaker 1: insane idea he's and he's also like really incredibly playing
Speaker 1: the media. It's really fascinating. Like he sees he's looking
Speaker 1: at this missile the size of a fucking building and goes,
Speaker 1: I bet I could stick a gun on that and
Speaker 1: that'd be pretty And if I put this out in
Speaker 1: the news and say that Canada's making it and they
Speaker 1: don't make it, it olympariss them, so now they have
Speaker 1: to make it. Well that was his hope. It doesn't
Speaker 1: quite work out. So the leaked story was obviously a
Speaker 1: calculated act, but it causes an uproar in the Canadian
Speaker 1: government and the Prime Minister, a guy named deefend Baker,
Speaker 1: loudly denounces the idea as bogus to the press, so
Speaker 1: it does not work for him and heads rolled in
Speaker 1: Bull's office. But the hubbub also led to massive press
Speaker 1: interest in the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment or CARD,
Speaker 1: which is where he was working at the time. Um
Speaker 1: and the subsequent A lot of the media coverage that
Speaker 1: comes out of this this leak and the around it
Speaker 1: focuses on guns that Gerald Bold had built, so he
Speaker 1: doesn't get his wish, he doesn't get to build his
Speaker 1: missile gun, but he gets a lot of interest in
Speaker 1: his the guns that he's already built, so it does
Speaker 1: kind of work out for him. By the end of
Speaker 1: the fifties, Bull was fed up with the timidity of
Speaker 1: his superiors. In April of nineteen sixty one, he had
Speaker 1: an argument with one of his bosses who wanted him
Speaker 1: to complete paperwork before moving on to actually testing stuff.
Speaker 1: Bull asked his boss which is more important, paperwork or
Speaker 1: getting the work done, and his boss said, in this case, paperwork.
Speaker 1: So Bold responded, you want paperwork, I'll give you paperwork,
Speaker 1: and he wrote out his resignation right there on the spot.
Speaker 1: So he stops working for the University of the Canadian government.
Speaker 1: This like big joint project. Um, yeah, you get a
Speaker 1: sense of like the kind of duty. I have to
Speaker 1: admit having a career in absolute security, I totally get that.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how many change controled documents I
Speaker 1: never filled out right, I can't fucking handle that ship.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to make routers do stuff and make
Speaker 1: firewalls go. I didn't want to make paperwork go. I
Speaker 1: get that, Yeah, I mean fuck paperwork. Like it's hard
Speaker 1: not to be on his side with some of this,
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, that that's I of course it would
Speaker 1: be frustrating if all you want to do is build
Speaker 1: guns into the into missiles and shoot them into space.
Speaker 1: If somebody wants you to fill out a fucking requisition
Speaker 1: form um, that's just useful time you had spend making
Speaker 1: your space guns. So according to the book Wilderness of
Speaker 1: Mirrors a report, which is a book about Gerald Bull,
Speaker 1: a Canadian Army intelligence report on Bold that came out
Speaker 1: after his death later analyzed this incident that led to
Speaker 1: him quitting card and concluded his tempestuous nature and strong
Speaker 1: dislike for administration and red tape constantly led him into
Speaker 1: trouble with senior management. In this is true, and you
Speaker 1: get the feeling that, however understandable some of us may
Speaker 1: have been, he was. He was an asshole to work with,
Speaker 1: like he was not an easy man to have as
Speaker 1: a colleague. Both transitioned pretty seamlessly to a professorship at
Speaker 1: McGill University, where he kept helped to carry out more
Speaker 1: experiments with aerodynamics and big guns. He and his wife
Speaker 1: actually purchased a two thousand acre plot of land on
Speaker 1: the Quebec Vermont border, which they donated to McGill University
Speaker 1: to use as a ballistics lab to like us as
Speaker 1: a shooting range. Bull quickly received funding from Project HARP,
Speaker 1: which stood for High Altitude Research Project. It would a
Speaker 1: joint operation by the U. S Department of Defense in
Speaker 1: the Canadian equivalent, and the goal was to study the
Speaker 1: ballistics of re entry using large guns to fire projectiles
Speaker 1: at high speed and then watching those projectiles fall back
Speaker 1: to Earth. So, right, this is part of the space race.
Speaker 1: They know we're gonna be launching shi up and we're
Speaker 1: gonna need some of it to come back without killing
Speaker 1: people in it. So we need to shoot a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff up into the atmosphere and then let it
Speaker 1: fall and take data on like what happens when ship falls,
Speaker 1: because we haven't done that before, and the most efficient
Speaker 1: way they can think of to do that is these
Speaker 1: giant guns that Gerald Bull has been building. Because it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't need to we don't need to actually be
Speaker 1: getting it into space. We just want to look at
Speaker 1: what's happening like aerodynamically as these things land. Let's have
Speaker 1: him shoot a bunch of stuff up and take notes
Speaker 1: on it. Are there bonus points of the projectiles land
Speaker 1: on a small Polynesian island? Um? I don't, it's not
Speaker 1: written about here. Um but maybe yeah maybe um? And
Speaker 1: and these are not like ballistic route like these are
Speaker 1: guns that could be used as artillery, but they're they're
Speaker 1: like little models and stuff that they're basically shooting and
Speaker 1: monitoring at this point, um. And Bulls work here is
Speaker 1: very successful, and he's very supported by his boss, the
Speaker 1: head of McGill's engineering department, Donald more Dell. Other professors
Speaker 1: described quote second rate attempts at manipulation by both to
Speaker 1: secure more resources for his work. This was unnecessary, as
Speaker 1: more Dell believed in Bulls projects, but he was constantly
Speaker 1: needled anyway in this war at him. So again, even
Speaker 1: when he's really supported by his boss, he can't like
Speaker 1: he's he never shows any gratitude for the stuff that
Speaker 1: he's getting. He's always just like no, no, I want more,
Speaker 1: I want more. I want to be able to do more.
Speaker 1: He's just you know, not a not a I mean
Speaker 1: he's he's also a very motivated guy, and so he's
Speaker 1: just kind of has this um. Some of it's being
Speaker 1: very prickly and addict some of it's just he's got
Speaker 1: this very relentless belief in his projects and can't really
Speaker 1: stand the thought of not moving forward on them. Now,
Speaker 1: Bulls work for HARP was wildly successful. His cannons worked
Speaker 1: even better than intended for the people funding the research.
Speaker 1: The primary goal here was just a further the space race.
Speaker 1: The guns existed to provide data on how different things
Speaker 1: re entered the atmosphere, but Gerald Bull didn't think of
Speaker 1: things that way. He believed his guns were the real
Speaker 1: stars of the show. And he starts to think about
Speaker 1: he starts to have more and more ideas around this, like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't really like the fact that the gun is
Speaker 1: just sort of a thing to study the ballistics of
Speaker 1: ship falling. I think the gun, I think these guns
Speaker 1: I'm building can really be like the basis of a
Speaker 1: new of the of the whole space program. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's how he increasingly starts to think. Now, what happens
Speaker 1: next is influenced by something that happens in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: And to tell that story, I'm gonna read a quote
Speaker 1: from a write up in The New York Times. A
Speaker 1: middle aged German woman arrived in Montreal to visit a
Speaker 1: relatively unknown scientist of McGill University Space Research Institute. The
Speaker 1: scientist was Professor Jerald Bull, then thirty seven. The German
Speaker 1: woman who sought Bull out was the daughter of an
Speaker 1: engineer who had worked on the top secret Paris Gun
Speaker 1: project during the First World War. Developed by Krupp, the
Speaker 1: German steelmakers, the Paris Gun was an enormous howitzer with
Speaker 1: a range of seventy four miles, double that of any
Speaker 1: weapon then existing. First fired on the morning of March
Speaker 1: twenty third, nineteen eighteen, during Germany's Spring Offensive, it instantly
Speaker 1: brought terror to Paris's Placid autrondisements. The first round hit
Speaker 1: the Palace of the Republic. The French aghast and mystified
Speaker 1: sent intelligence officers into the woods surrounding the city in
Speaker 1: search of a hidden German gun emplacement. On Good Friday, March,
Speaker 1: the guns scored a hit on the Church of Saint
Speaker 1: Gervas in central Paris, killing ninety one and injuring a hundred.
Speaker 1: The Paris Gun came too late to turn the tide
Speaker 1: of the First World War in Germany's favor, but it
Speaker 1: was an incredible technical triumph for its inventor, Fritz Rausenberger,
Speaker 1: corrupts head of artillery development and production. Even with the
Speaker 1: relatively primitive technology of the time, the show reached a
Speaker 1: height of twenty six miles, an altitude not exceeded until
Speaker 1: Germany developed the V two rocket in World War Two.
Speaker 1: So this woman uh comes to Canada with papers from
Speaker 1: Rousenburger's archives. So the Germans the Paris Gun never falls
Speaker 1: into Allied hands at the end of World War One.
Speaker 1: It's dismantled and like hidden or destroyed, and nobody knows
Speaker 1: how this thing was fucking built, right, because it's it's
Speaker 1: a military secret. It doesn't fall in anyone's hands. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a mystery. The blueprints were lost forever, essentially,
Speaker 1: But this German woman has an unpublished manuscript from Rausenburger's
Speaker 1: family archives and it wasn't the original blueprint, but it
Speaker 1: had hard data on the gun's capabilities, and it's not
Speaker 1: information that bow is able to reverse engineer the gun
Speaker 1: from this and rebuild it via computer model, so he
Speaker 1: actually gets effectively the plans for the Paris Gun by this.
Speaker 1: I guess this woman who's just like, well, he's he's
Speaker 1: building the biggest guns anyone's building. Uh, And I think my, my, uh,
Speaker 1: my ancestor Felix would would want him to have these plants.
Speaker 1: It's I'm a big fan of giant guns. I hear
Speaker 1: you're a fan of giant guns. Why don't you give
Speaker 1: you some of the secret information so you could build
Speaker 1: a giant ass gun. Yeah, it's really kind of a weird, Like,
Speaker 1: I want to know more about this lady who just
Speaker 1: like is take to buy this quest to help this
Speaker 1: man build the biggest gun effort. It's such a strange
Speaker 1: thing to what to do. But I'm gonna quote again
Speaker 1: from The New York Times about what happens next. At
Speaker 1: that moment, the obsession was born that would dominate Bull's
Speaker 1: life and determine his death. Bull realized that if the
Speaker 1: projectile and the huge gun was a powered rocket, its
Speaker 1: range could be increased dramatically. With the backing of the
Speaker 1: United States Army, the Canadian Department of Defense, production in
Speaker 1: McGill University. He established a test site on the island
Speaker 1: of Barbados and set to work on the High Altitude
Speaker 1: Research Project. By welding together to sixteen inch guns that
Speaker 1: had been put in storage by the U. S. Navy,
Speaker 1: Bull created a huge gun, thirty six meters long with
Speaker 1: a diameter of four hundred and twenty four millimeters. It
Speaker 1: remains the longest working gun ever built. So he is
Speaker 1: he is the man who's made the biggest gun, at
Speaker 1: least the longest gun. I don't even know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's wild. I can totally see why he was going
Speaker 1: down this path. And the concept of instead of just
Speaker 1: using a rocket from the surface to get to space,
Speaker 1: I mean making a rocket giving it its boost by
Speaker 1: just a general ballistic boost with a gun is pretty
Speaker 1: amazing idea. It is, And he is a weapons designer here,
Speaker 1: but he's his goal is not to make a weapon
Speaker 1: the weapon. His goal is, like I think the gun
Speaker 1: should be a platform for space exploration. Um. So again,
Speaker 1: nothing like bad that he's done here, Like even within
Speaker 1: the context of like, yeah, it's wild that he's got
Speaker 1: like the plans for this German apocalypse canon, um, but
Speaker 1: he's using it because he wants to shoot stuff into space,
Speaker 1: which I would say is a broadly noble aim wanting
Speaker 1: to shoot stuff. I mean there's always like the whole
Speaker 1: Dick measuring of the Cold War, but like it's cool
Speaker 1: to put stuff in space. It's interesting to think about this.
Speaker 1: You've got that, You've got the Paris gun being used
Speaker 1: in this instance, and the V two rocket ultimately in
Speaker 1: von Braun, Yeah, the Saturn five that gets us to
Speaker 1: the moon, right, I mean that's that's two different instances
Speaker 1: of these German weapons of war being turned into space
Speaker 1: exploration ideas. Yeah, it's interesting that, like he we get Bull,
Speaker 1: a gun that was made basically so that we could
Speaker 1: shell random civilian structures in Paris to scare the French,
Speaker 1: winds up becoming the basis of a system to shoot
Speaker 1: satellites into space. Like that's that is really strange, um,
Speaker 1: but I'd make sense, you know, like obviously, if you
Speaker 1: can shoot a shell seventy four miles, you're not all
Speaker 1: that far from being able to put something into space.
Speaker 1: You're well on your way at least, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I believe the V two was the first thing
Speaker 1: to actually ever make it into space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yes,
Speaker 1: the German arms industry complicated, complicated thing to think about,
Speaker 1: a lot of good, a lot of bad. Speaking have
Speaker 1: a lot of good, a lot of bad. Break is
Speaker 1: heavily supported by the German arms industry. Sophie, this podcast
Speaker 1: uh huh, yeah we are. We are entirely supported by
Speaker 1: the German munitions industry. So go pick up a uh
Speaker 1: something from car. Just find some sort of car arm
Speaker 1: by it or one of those submarines the Germans keep
Speaker 1: selling the Egyptians for some reason. Get one of those.
Speaker 1: Explain why this podcast is as hard as crystall That's
Speaker 1: exactly right. That's what everyone says about our podcast. We're
Speaker 1: the first people anyone said that about. Anyway, here's ads Ah,
Speaker 1: We're back. So Gerald Bowl at this point has built
Speaker 1: the longest gun anyone still has ever built, I guess
Speaker 1: because there's not really any need for like if you
Speaker 1: could shoot a thing into space. You've kind of made
Speaker 1: the biggest gun anyone needs to make. There's not a
Speaker 1: lot of of of point to going bigger at that point.
Speaker 1: At that stage, so as the project neared its close,
Speaker 1: Bull felt he'd perfected plans for a gun launched three
Speaker 1: stage rocket with flipout fins using the SABO technology he'd
Speaker 1: helped work on that could put a small, functional satellite
Speaker 1: into orbit. He was extremely excited by this idea, As
Speaker 1: his son Philip later recalled, he thought HARP would be
Speaker 1: a big advancement for Canada and aeronautical engineering. They were
Speaker 1: already putting small probes into space. It was the drive
Speaker 1: of his life to be working on that project. He
Speaker 1: was alone, it was his project. It came from his brains,
Speaker 1: and it was functioning. It worked, and so this is
Speaker 1: like the high point of his life. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: last long because on June thirtieth, nineteen sixty seven, the
Speaker 1: Canadian government stops funding HARP. Their justification is that they
Speaker 1: didn't like the idea that their space program would be
Speaker 1: so closely associated with military hardware. They find it distasteful
Speaker 1: that their space program involves like gigantic guns. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: they don't like the idea. That's one reason. Another reason
Speaker 1: is that, um, they're they're they're moving towards rockets, right.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of scientists working in the US in
Speaker 1: Canada on the space race are all pretty much an
Speaker 1: agreement that rockets are the way to get shipped into
Speaker 1: space without breaking it. Um. And you know, bull is
Speaker 1: kind of his his attitude is like, well, no, we
Speaker 1: should do it with gigantic guns. And he's basically the
Speaker 1: only guy on team giant guns for the space race, right,
Speaker 1: so obviously he does not win that argument. Um. And
Speaker 1: who knows what would have been better? Right, Like it
Speaker 1: worked out more or less, So I'm not gonna backseat
Speaker 1: rocket scientist. Interesting to note the US had no such
Speaker 1: qualms about the origins of their technology. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't I don't like that was one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that like they gave him. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much I about leave any government would like give
Speaker 1: a shit about that, But I don't think of governments
Speaker 1: as being basically that altruistic. So that's odd. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean maybe it was like maybe there was some pr
Speaker 1: concern because he's using some of his technology, is this
Speaker 1: giant Paris gun, which is doesn't have a great history,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, but yeah, uh so right, he the
Speaker 1: rocket scientists kind of went out over the gun scientists,
Speaker 1: who are basically just Gerald bull Um and The New
Speaker 1: York Times in their write up, adds that quote. Bull
Speaker 1: later admitted that personality clashes had aggravated his budgetary problems.
Speaker 1: Arrogance was his trademark, and he had made few friends
Speaker 1: among his government backers. He frequently referred to bureaucrats as
Speaker 1: morons and the lowest form of life on Earth. The
Speaker 1: abrupt termination of HARP devastated Bull. He was out in
Speaker 1: the wilderness, his dream of recreating the Paris guns stillborn.
Speaker 1: The Cocktail scientists had beaten him, but Bull was determined
Speaker 1: to get his revenge, and an epilog to the book,
Speaker 1: called Studies of Ultra Performance HARP Systems, he sketched out
Speaker 1: plans for an extraordinary new weapon, a launcher thirty two
Speaker 1: inches in diameter that could blast a tw pound payload
Speaker 1: six hundred miles into space. I'm sure this is going
Speaker 1: to take a darker turn, but up until now, his
Speaker 1: disdain for pace for work and his desire to prove
Speaker 1: this technology with the ultimate goal of launching very endearing.
Speaker 1: It's actually I'm kind of digging the guy at the moment.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of waiting for the bomb to drop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's about too but it is like it is, there
Speaker 1: is something noble about like this man just wanted to
Speaker 1: build a gun that could shoot stuff into space. And
Speaker 1: I mean that's a noble goal in itself. When you
Speaker 1: think at the Space Race, I mean, we knew this
Speaker 1: was needed to be done. It's it's it's also a
Speaker 1: pretty cool life, Ambishop. And frankly, if he had gotten
Speaker 1: it done sooner, maybe we wouldn't have seen would have
Speaker 1: put Elon Musk into a different line of business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'd be just making cannons to shoot rich people into space.
Speaker 1: So Bull decided he was done with bureaucrats and cocktail
Speaker 1: scientists forever. He used his savings and his wife's ample
Speaker 1: family money to form his own company, the Space Research
Speaker 1: Corporation of Quebec. This was modeled after the institute he'd
Speaker 1: worked for at McGill, but it would be private and
Speaker 1: not as subject to the whims of government officials. Since
Speaker 1: Harp had been killed, the equipment built for it was
Speaker 1: being sold for basically nothing, so Bull's new company buys
Speaker 1: all of this, including the Barbados gun in the test area,
Speaker 1: for basically nothing. They also get a twenty thousand acre
Speaker 1: site near Quebec. Most of their funding comes from contracts
Speaker 1: by the U. S. Army UM or US military, who
Speaker 1: are not interested in Bull's satellite goals, but are interested
Speaker 1: in his ability to make big, funk up guns um
Speaker 1: and his pitch to them is basically like, I built
Speaker 1: the biggest gun ever, want to see if I can
Speaker 1: make a bigger one. Um. And Niois is actually not
Speaker 1: all that interested in his guns, but as we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier, they're interested in better artillery shells for their
Speaker 1: existing guns. Um, and they want Bull to make them
Speaker 1: nuclear capable artillery shells with a top range of twenty
Speaker 1: five miles, which is fucking nuts. Wanting to shoot a
Speaker 1: nuke at someone twenty miles away with the field gun
Speaker 1: is absolutely mad cap. Like you can start driving in
Speaker 1: the opposite direction and have a remote detonator to set
Speaker 1: it off, a remote trigger. Yeah, Gerald, who wants you
Speaker 1: to make a suicide? And and for our boys in Europe,
Speaker 1: just something that will kill everybody around? What's the kill
Speaker 1: So we're gonna launch this what's the kill radius? Fifty mile? Oh?
Speaker 1: This sounds like a great plan. Yeah cool? Um Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like the early seventies, so you have to
Speaker 1: assume a lot of cocaine is involved at this point. Um.
Speaker 1: So Operation Nuke Bullets is a big hit and even
Speaker 1: non nuclear versions of the shells are sold end mass
Speaker 1: to Israel in nineteen seventy three for counter battery fire
Speaker 1: because they were getting outraged by Soviet artillery and a
Speaker 1: number of engagements they had, and these new shells allow
Speaker 1: them to take the range advantage back in a number
Speaker 1: of their conflicts. So the U S. Defense Establishment goes
Speaker 1: very gaga for Bulls bullets, which had made the U S.
Speaker 1: M one oh seven the most valuable field gun on
Speaker 1: the face of the earth. Money came pouring in, and
Speaker 1: the United States was grateful enough that Bastard's pot alumni,
Speaker 1: Berry Goldwater, the then Senator from Arizona, pushed forward a
Speaker 1: bill making Gerald Bull retroactively a US citizen for the
Speaker 1: last ten years. Now, that's interesting. Goldwater shows up in
Speaker 1: such interesting places over and over again. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: real weird one for him to be it. And the
Speaker 1: reason they give Gerald Bull like basically his citizenship accounts
Speaker 1: as if he's been a citizen for ten years. It's
Speaker 1: it's security clearance thing. They want to be able to
Speaker 1: give him a higher security clearance because of the work
Speaker 1: that he's doing. But there's like requirements about how long
Speaker 1: you had to be a US citizen. He's one of
Speaker 1: I think three people who have ever had this done,
Speaker 1: unless you were a Nazi, and then you just get
Speaker 1: straight lined right in. Well, yeah, we don't talk about
Speaker 1: that so much. That doesn't go up in Congress. You know,
Speaker 1: it's different. Yeah, the Space Research Corporation was doing pretty
Speaker 1: well by most people standards at this point. They've got
Speaker 1: about eleven million dollars in US defense contracts, which is
Speaker 1: quite a lot of money at the time, but Bull
Speaker 1: is still disappointed by their rate of growth. From the
Speaker 1: Washington Post quote and two competitions, his revolutionary hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty five millimeter shell design outshot the U. S. Armies
Speaker 1: in cannon system hands down, according to knowledgeable sources, but
Speaker 1: the army spurned his system and stuck with its own
Speaker 1: less powerful guns. So they want his shells. They have
Speaker 1: things they want him to do for them, but he
Speaker 1: wants to make really big guns and sell them, and
Speaker 1: the U. S. Armies like, no, we don't really, we
Speaker 1: don't want to buy a whole new set of artillery. Like,
Speaker 1: we're happy that you've made the ones we have work
Speaker 1: a lot better. We don't. We're not really on board
Speaker 1: with this ship. And again he never forgives the United
Speaker 1: States for not wanting to buy his big stupid cannons.
Speaker 1: Um now, he'll keep taking their money, but this like
Speaker 1: really enrages him, so he works at a deal with
Speaker 1: a Belgian ammunition manufacturer to create a European subsidiary of
Speaker 1: his company, funded by an injection of their investment cash.
Speaker 1: This money allowed Gerald Bold to do what he did best,
Speaker 1: designed new, really fucking big cannons, and his latest invention
Speaker 1: was the g C Gun Canadian, a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: five millimeter howitzer that could fire a shell with twice
Speaker 1: the throw weight of any of the biggest guns used
Speaker 1: at the time. It outranges all of the existing field
Speaker 1: artillery in the world by a significant margin. The New
Speaker 1: York Times rights quote a triumph of military engineering. The
Speaker 1: g C forty five vindicated Bulls belief in his own genius.
Speaker 1: He took his revenge by selling it to the highest
Speaker 1: bidder That turned out to be South Africa, then fighting
Speaker 1: a costly war against Soviet backed Angolan and Cuban forces
Speaker 1: on the savannahs of Angola, and in desperate need of
Speaker 1: a new long range artillery weapon restricted by the United Nations,
Speaker 1: arms embargo, the South African regimes set out to acquire
Speaker 1: the g C forty five technology illegally. At first, South
Speaker 1: Africa approached Space Research Corporation to provide fifty five thousand
Speaker 1: extended range shells for its existing artillery. The US helps
Speaker 1: the deal along with the with the when the Office
Speaker 1: of Munitions Control waived the requirement to obtain an export
Speaker 1: license for what we're termed as rough steel forgings two
Speaker 1: unidentified gun barrels. The g C forty five test models
Speaker 1: were shipped out with the shells, so this is very illegal.
Speaker 1: So what happens is he gets the u US to
Speaker 1: approve him selling them better shells, and he ships out
Speaker 1: pieces of these GC forty five guns of a prototype
Speaker 1: to the South Africans. At the same time in the
Speaker 1: U S is very aware about this, but it's all
Speaker 1: kept on the download because you're not allowed to sell
Speaker 1: South African new military technology because they're using it in
Speaker 1: brutal colonial wars. UH with a deep racist bent. I
Speaker 1: have to assume that the US government at that point
Speaker 1: eyebawling that security clearance they gave him pretty warily. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: they're on board with this because South Africa's anti communist.
Speaker 1: This is very illegal, but he's he they are, they
Speaker 1: know exactly what's going on. They're helping make this happen.
Speaker 1: But it's also technically illegal, right, Like it's one of these.
Speaker 1: George Gerald's son Michael Um later would say about his
Speaker 1: father's understanding of the arrangement that he was quote led
Speaker 1: to believe it was the thing to do, that the
Speaker 1: US had a passive policy to more or less favor
Speaker 1: these type of things in order to save the last
Speaker 1: bastion of capitalism in Africa. So it's very illegal, and
Speaker 1: no one ever says we're making this legal. They're just like, hey,
Speaker 1: if you just do this, it's not going to be
Speaker 1: a problem. We got you. We got you, buddy. Just like,
Speaker 1: just just get the biggest guns possible to the most
Speaker 1: racist country in the world, so many of them that
Speaker 1: you can ship over um, and by god, he does.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy seven, the South African government's Arms Division
Speaker 1: buys a which I think is called arms Core by
Speaker 1: a steak in the Space Research Corporation, which came with
Speaker 1: a license to manufacture the g C forty five, which
Speaker 1: they'd already received parts to copy. Soon South Africa was
Speaker 1: marketing their gun as the G five, a product of
Speaker 1: their home grown arms industry and absolutely not a violation
Speaker 1: of international law. So they're like, we made a cannon
Speaker 1: that's really good on our own. We just popped us
Speaker 1: out of nothing. We just figured this out all on
Speaker 1: our own, pulled out a little, you know, sheet of
Speaker 1: paper at the local pub and drew on it with
Speaker 1: some crayons, and boom, here we go. Can build a
Speaker 1: real big gun all on our own, just us southcot.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's our South African ingenuity right there, right,
Speaker 1: So this works out for a while, works great for
Speaker 1: the South Africans because again they were being very badly
Speaker 1: as as Israel had been. They were being like horribly
Speaker 1: outraged by better Soviet artillery. And once they've got the
Speaker 1: G five, like fuck it, Like again, it's the best
Speaker 1: field gun in the world, right, Like nothing really measures
Speaker 1: up to encounter battery fire. Um. So, unfortunately for Bull,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty, the story about his little cannon caper
Speaker 1: goes public. The Washington Post writes quote when press reports
Speaker 1: later revealed that the munitions had gone to South Africa
Speaker 1: despite a US trade embargo, The Customs Service began probing
Speaker 1: src Bowl enlisted Trudeau, who's an American general who had
Speaker 1: once headed Army intelligence, and Richard Bissell, former deputy director
Speaker 1: of the CIA, to take his case to the highest
Speaker 1: levels of the Carter administration. Within a few months, Lawrence Curtis,
Speaker 1: the customs agent who headed the Bull probe, found that
Speaker 1: his ambitious plans for wide ranging indictments of numerous individuals
Speaker 1: and firms and three countries for arms export crimes had
Speaker 1: come unraveled. Bull and one other individual were allowed to
Speaker 1: plead to reduced charges, a move that resolved the case quickly,
Speaker 1: but also eliminated any possibility that a trial could produce
Speaker 1: potentially embarrassing revelations about any involvement of US agencies with
Speaker 1: Bulls munitions exports. I was totally surprised, very disappointed and bewildered,
Speaker 1: says Curtis, and Curtis quits not that long after this
Speaker 1: um now the House Subcommittee on Africa subsequently discovers that
Speaker 1: the States O MC had been told of the Bull
Speaker 1: South Africa scheme three years before the shipments were reported
Speaker 1: publicly and had done nothing. The reponderance of evidence was
Speaker 1: that through the CIA introductions, the United States was turning
Speaker 1: a blind eye, recalls Subcommittee chairman Howard Wolp. The United
Speaker 1: States government was totally negligent in enforcing American law. So again,
Speaker 1: this is like the CIA is heavily involved, Like they
Speaker 1: we absolutely approve of this until it gets discovered, and
Speaker 1: then it's like this, Yeah, you gotta fall in your
Speaker 1: sword a little bit, buddy, Um, but we'll make sure
Speaker 1: the investigation doesn't get that far. And you just get
Speaker 1: kind of a slap on the wrist, you know, like
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to take one for the team here,
Speaker 1: but we're not going to let them actually fully investigate
Speaker 1: your company or what's happened. So that it's such a
Speaker 1: great example of how these American agencies work, right, are
Speaker 1: many many government agencies work the actual supposed will of
Speaker 1: the country or the law of the country's irrelevant to
Speaker 1: the agency, and they really run as a rogue state
Speaker 1: within a state. Yeah, and and that's like exactly what
Speaker 1: happens here. And they try to promise Bull like, hey,
Speaker 1: if you just play ball with this, it's not going
Speaker 1: to be that bad, um, and they wind up being
Speaker 1: a little wrong. So so Bull pleads guilty to one
Speaker 1: count of smuggling thirty thousand shells, two cannon barrels, and
Speaker 1: a radar van to South Africa without a license. Now
Speaker 1: you would think that would be a pretty serious crime.
Speaker 1: I think if I were to smuggle thirty thousand high
Speaker 1: explosive shells to any country, I would probably get in
Speaker 1: a lot of trouble. Um, that would be my guess.
Speaker 1: The federal prosecutors recommend no jail time. Well it was
Speaker 1: against a communist, right, yeah, it was the healthy was
Speaker 1: to fight communists. Um. And it's actually this is a
Speaker 1: rare case. The judge in this, as I guess, kind
Speaker 1: of rad because he puts Bull away for six months
Speaker 1: because it's up to him, right, so he is able
Speaker 1: to like the Feds are trying to give Bull no
Speaker 1: time at all, and this judge is like, oh, fuck
Speaker 1: that ship, like you have to do some fucking time,
Speaker 1: like like fuck you man, um. And so Bull actually
Speaker 1: does go to jail for six months, which he's fucking vivid.
Speaker 1: This makes him so angry at the United States at
Speaker 1: this and like he's just enraged, and it is like
Speaker 1: it's weird because like obviously no sympathy for a man
Speaker 1: who gets in trouble smuggling arms to the apartheid South
Speaker 1: African government, right like fuck that, fuck you. But also
Speaker 1: he did get screwed over, right like he was just
Speaker 1: doing what the army and the CIA wanted him to do.
Speaker 1: It did teach him a hard lesson about how the
Speaker 1: US government actually functions with its allies. Yeah. And it's
Speaker 1: one of those things, like, you know, we talk about
Speaker 1: how nice Jimmy Carter's post presidency thing is, Like the
Speaker 1: administration does everything they can to get this guy off
Speaker 1: because they're fine with it. Everyone's fine with it except
Speaker 1: for this one judge. So good on you, judge for
Speaker 1: doing something. I wonder what happened to that judge. Did
Speaker 1: he like wake up dead one day? Probably had a
Speaker 1: bad fishing trip. This was the period in which there
Speaker 1: were more consequences for making the CIA angry. Um. You
Speaker 1: know who else makes the CIA angry? Nest Lee, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do that. Nestle's intelligence arm does now significantly outrange
Speaker 1: the CIA. Um. It's it's really they come from behind
Speaker 1: victory for the Nestle Corporation, our primary sponsor. AUH. And
Speaker 1: we're back. So when we last left off, our buddy
Speaker 1: Gerald Bowl, he's been kind of fucked over. He also
Speaker 1: totally deserved to do time for smuggling guns to South Africa.
Speaker 1: But also he's not the one who probably should have
Speaker 1: gotten the worst penalty for that. Probably a bunch of
Speaker 1: CIA dudes who should have been punished for that, and
Speaker 1: a bunch of other stuff. So Bull is very angry. Um,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's it's it's it's just kind of a
Speaker 1: fucked up situation. True to form, he goes on the
Speaker 1: war path against his former employer and like spends a
Speaker 1: lot of time in the media ship talking the United
Speaker 1: States and like particularly our level of weapons development. He
Speaker 1: tells a Canadian journalist quote, the US has obsolete conventional
Speaker 1: weapons and no morale in their armed forces. They couldn't
Speaker 1: defeat Tim bucktoo in a fight. And this is not
Speaker 1: long after the end of the Vietnam War. So he's like,
Speaker 1: he's also not not far off, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: poured a little salt into the wound. Yeah, bulls US
Speaker 1: and Canadian businesses had gone broke as a result of
Speaker 1: the whole scandal, but his Belgian operations were still humming along. Now,
Speaker 1: furious at both Canada in the United States, he moved
Speaker 1: to Brussels, and started making money the only way he
Speaker 1: knew how, by selling really fucking big guns. He designed
Speaker 1: a new howitzer based off of the g C forty
Speaker 1: five for Austria, and he made a cool five million
Speaker 1: selling them. The plans both told the Austrians, Hey, you
Speaker 1: guys are gonna be making this cannon your your your
Speaker 1: arms industry at home. There's not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: You don't need a whole lot of guns for the
Speaker 1: Austrian army. You might want to consider selling them. And
Speaker 1: by the way, I think I know a guy who's
Speaker 1: in the market for some really big guns. Little dude
Speaker 1: you might have heard of named Saddam Hussein. Yeah. Baby,
Speaker 1: Our favorite romance novelist is in the game, a story
Speaker 1: about a man who wanted to build the biggest gun ever.
Speaker 1: Would of course involve Iraq at some point. It is
Speaker 1: the seventies, so his guns. The Austrians start making a
Speaker 1: shipload of bulls guns and sending them to Jordan, who
Speaker 1: then sells them to it. Well, they're being sold to Iraq,
Speaker 1: but kind of by way of Jordan's so that the
Speaker 1: Austrians can pretend that's selling to Jordan. Because you can't
Speaker 1: really sell guns to Iraq right now, because Saddam Hussein
Speaker 1: was a little bit of an international pariah because he
Speaker 1: had just invaded Iran and started this horrible one of
Speaker 1: the great blood best in the twentieth century. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of dicey selling guns to Saddam right now, so
Speaker 1: they have to hide it yet again. Here's the Washington
Speaker 1: Post quote. According to a still classified Austrian report, Saddam,
Speaker 1: whose war with Iran had bogged down, met with the
Speaker 1: Austrian Interior Minister in April two and demanded to know
Speaker 1: where are our guns? Can't you speed up delivery? We
Speaker 1: require them urgently. Vest Alpine was Austria's largest state owned industry,
Speaker 1: but facing slumping sales and layoffs, it made a risky
Speaker 1: secret decision to violate neutral Austria's ban on selling weapons
Speaker 1: to belligerents, and in the next few years sold bulls
Speaker 1: cannons not only to Iraq but also to Iran. Today
Speaker 1: that the two former Austrian chancellors and various other cabinet
Speaker 1: ministers have become the subject of the largest criminal investigations
Speaker 1: in Austrian history. Documents and records in the vest Alpine
Speaker 1: sale of two g h in forty five to Iran
Speaker 1: indicate that the Reagan administration, pursuing its tilt towards Iraq
Speaker 1: in the Iran Iraq War, quietly eased the sale of
Speaker 1: guns to Iraq, but sought to prevent the Austrians from
Speaker 1: selling bulls guns to Iran. Now, this was an unusual
Speaker 1: a piece of moral consistency from the Reagan administration, because
Speaker 1: they absolutely sell guns to the Iranians too, Like they
Speaker 1: have no problem selling weapons to the Iranians, but they
Speaker 1: do briefly try to stop bowl. Um what better way
Speaker 1: to make profit when you sell meat grinders than to
Speaker 1: also sell the meat? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um. The CIA
Speaker 1: actually sits down with the Austrian ambassador and shows him,
Speaker 1: like ci a satellite photos of these artillery pieces in
Speaker 1: an Iranian training center, and there are some like token
Speaker 1: efforts made to stop for their trade, but Iran gets
Speaker 1: like two hundred of these guns. Bulls business with China
Speaker 1: was doing gangbusters now too, so he also starts through
Speaker 1: the CIA selling guns to China because the CIA has
Speaker 1: a vested interest in China having artillery that can outrage
Speaker 1: Soviet artillery because the Chinese and the Soviets are having
Speaker 1: all sorts of fucking kerfuffles right now, like border kerfuffles,
Speaker 1: and we're kind of this is after Nixon goes to China.
Speaker 1: We're very much tilting like towards China, especially as like
Speaker 1: an anti Soviet sort of thing. So the CIA is
Speaker 1: very bullish on the idea of China getting their hands
Speaker 1: on some of these gigantic, fucking bull cannons um and
Speaker 1: China loves this guy. Uh. They invite him to a
Speaker 1: test range in Manchuria in nineteen eighty three, and his
Speaker 1: guides in China showed him that they had collected every
Speaker 1: academic paper he published over the course of his career
Speaker 1: going back to the fifties. They told him they wanted
Speaker 1: his help to aid armsmaker Narenko in producing a full
Speaker 1: line of his hundred and fifty five millimeter canons. Now
Speaker 1: they understood that they were dealing with a guy who
Speaker 1: had a massive ego, and they provide him with food, drinks,
Speaker 1: and flattery. He even has his photo taken with Dan
Speaker 1: Jao Ping and was with Dan Jao Ping and was
Speaker 1: invited to teach a course at Nanjing University, which he did.
Speaker 1: So they're very much like, oh, we get what kind
Speaker 1: of man you are, we will, we will, we will
Speaker 1: make you as happy as possible because we want very
Speaker 1: large guns. We would like the biggest guns you can
Speaker 1: make us. Please. Now, there's a little bit of a
Speaker 1: problem here, because in order to sell this technology, or
Speaker 1: at least his knowledge of how to make it, to China,
Speaker 1: there's a munitions control license, right, like you have to
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of things you have to do to
Speaker 1: sell weapons to China if the weapon technology is of
Speaker 1: US origin. And Bull is a US citizen now, but
Speaker 1: he's also a Canadian citizen, and he gets his friend
Speaker 1: true Daw, this army general former head of Intelligence, and
Speaker 1: his CIA buddies to argue that since he's Canadian, the
Speaker 1: weapons are not of US origin and thus no export
Speaker 1: license is necessary. Um, And the State Department is like,
Speaker 1: this is not a very good justification. But the CIA
Speaker 1: is again like, na, no, no, no, let this ship happen.
Speaker 1: We want to get these guys the biggest guns we
Speaker 1: can get them. In nineteen eighty four, this story broke
Speaker 1: when a customs agent, acting off of a tip, searched
Speaker 1: Bull at an airport and found as signed twenty five
Speaker 1: million dollar arms contract with China in his suitcase. Maybe
Speaker 1: it don't take that one with you. Well, you couldn't
Speaker 1: fit the cannon in your suitcase, you can certainly fit
Speaker 1: the contract. Yeah, just keep it as his keeping, as
Speaker 1: giant international crime contract in his suitcase as he walks
Speaker 1: through security. Um, so there's a grand jury investigation and
Speaker 1: it looks again like Bull is about to go away
Speaker 1: for arms dealing. But again the CIA steps in and
Speaker 1: they squashed the case, which dies completely. He doesn't even
Speaker 1: go to trial at this point, like they just put
Speaker 1: an end to this because they really want China to
Speaker 1: get these guns. And in fact, in nine six, the
Speaker 1: Pentagon actually steps in directly to help China complete their
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty five millimeter cannon production line designed by Bull,
Speaker 1: The Washington Post reports quote according to a US defense
Speaker 1: consultant involved in the project, the Army issued a US
Speaker 1: funded foreign military sales contract to a California firm to
Speaker 1: provide China with a one hundred and fifty five millimeter
Speaker 1: artillery fuse manufacturing line. Initially, I was surprised, this consultant said,
Speaker 1: I thought Narenko only made a hundred and thirties smaller guns,
Speaker 1: So why were they building hundred and fifty five millimeter
Speaker 1: fuses when they didn't have a hundred and fifty fives
Speaker 1: while the US government knew they were building one prior
Speaker 1: to nine six. Barely a year later, said the consultant
Speaker 1: in Israeli intelligence sources, Narenko had made its first sale
Speaker 1: of the so called W A C. Twenty one bowl
Speaker 1: designed guns to Iraq. According to a person associated with
Speaker 1: Bull's work in Iraq, the scientists soon caught the attention
Speaker 1: of Camille Hussain, an influential cousin and son in law
Speaker 1: of Saddam, with a proposal that Bull, Narenko and a
Speaker 1: Spanish firm build a huge two hundred and three millimeters
Speaker 1: self propelled howitzer for Iraq. It's fascinating to me that
Speaker 1: even when he's helping China build these guns, they still
Speaker 1: keep winding up in Saddam's army. All everything flows to Saddam.
Speaker 1: Who's saying in this period, if you're making big guns,
Speaker 1: they are winding up in Saddam's armory at some points
Speaker 1: like Yo, dog, I heard about this thing called the
Speaker 1: pair scun I kind of want they around gun. Can
Speaker 1: you help me with this? I would like to shoot
Speaker 1: to run with a giant cannon from Baghdad Police. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah. So so Bull works with Narenko and a
Speaker 1: Spanish company and they make this massive two hundred and
Speaker 1: three millimeter howitzer for the Iraqi military. There's a prototype
Speaker 1: of this stupidly huge gun called the owl Foul that
Speaker 1: was produced and shown off at an arm show in Baghdad.
Speaker 1: And Saddam is over the moon about this. If you
Speaker 1: know anything about our man, Saddam, motherfucker loved his guns.
Speaker 1: Um literally got an education by threatening his principle at gunpoint.
Speaker 1: Was was a big fan of big guns. Um, and
Speaker 1: he is enthralled by Bull. Um the finally Bull has
Speaker 1: found a guy who's like anything you want to make, man,
Speaker 1: as long as it's a real big gun. Like I
Speaker 1: I'm I'm on board. Can you gold play one of these?
Speaker 1: I kind of can you go play one of these fuckers? Son?
Speaker 1: Carry it aro out. So in Night, Saddam Hussein signs
Speaker 1: a contract with Gerald Bolt produce more normal artillery. So
Speaker 1: now Bull is just working directly with the Iraqi government.
Speaker 1: So he signs his contract to make you more hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty fives and two oh three's. But he also
Speaker 1: in the contract is included something else. He finally has
Speaker 1: a contract to make the gun of his dreams. See,
Speaker 1: Saddam was an ambitious man, and he wanted to start
Speaker 1: his own space program. Now, if you've ever interface with
Speaker 1: any relics of the old Bathist government or talked to
Speaker 1: a single Iraqi who lived under that government, the idea
Speaker 1: that Saddam would have had a successful space program is
Speaker 1: um a fun proposition. I think a lot of things
Speaker 1: would have burst in in re entry um. But Bull
Speaker 1: was confident that his genius was enough to overcome the
Speaker 1: fact that Saddam Hussein was terrible at running Iraq. From
Speaker 1: the BBC quote, the Iraqi government paid Bull twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars to begin Project Babylon, the first true space gun project,
Speaker 1: on the condition that he continued to work on their artillery.
Speaker 1: Project Babylon began life as three super guns, too full
Speaker 1: sized Big Babylon one thousand millimeter caliber guns, and a
Speaker 1: prototype three hundred and fifty millimeter gun called Baby Babylon.
Speaker 1: The full size Big Babylon barrel would have been a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six meters in length with a one
Speaker 1: meter bore. In total, it would have weighed fift hundred
Speaker 1: and ten tons, far too big to be transportable, and
Speaker 1: so instead would have been mounted at a forty five
Speaker 1: degree angle on a hillside. The absolute biggest gun anyone
Speaker 1: has ever thought to build. Yeah, like that, the a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six meter long barrel, a thousand millimeter
Speaker 1: like Jesus Christ. It's really hard to wrap your head
Speaker 1: around that size. Honestly, when you think about it, when
Speaker 1: you really put that into context, it's done the skies
Speaker 1: of a skyscraper, right yeah. Um. Each shot would have
Speaker 1: used nine tons of especially designed propellant um, and using
Speaker 1: this propellant, Big Babylon would have been theoretically capable of
Speaker 1: shooting a six gram projectile across a thousand kilometers of distance,
Speaker 1: putting Kuwait and Iran well within striking distance from inside
Speaker 1: of Iraq. Alternatively, the gun could have been used to
Speaker 1: launch a two thousand kilogram rocket assisted projectile carrying a
Speaker 1: two kilogram satellite. Now, had it been completed, Big Babylon
Speaker 1: probably would have been a really low cost way to
Speaker 1: launch satellites of a certain size. Right now, NASA estimates
Speaker 1: it costs about twenty two dollars per kilogram to put
Speaker 1: something into orbit. Gerald's gun would have cost about sevent
Speaker 1: d dollars per kilogram, over and over again. The concept
Speaker 1: doesn't sound it seems it makes sense the idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and like Saddam probably if he had not been
Speaker 1: quite the guy that he was um and he had
Speaker 1: actually had this thing built, he probably could have made
Speaker 1: good money on it, you know. Like the problem is
Speaker 1: that the Iraqi government under Saddam was and and today
Speaker 1: there was so much corruption that I don't know how
Speaker 1: much I think they would have actually been able to
Speaker 1: like get this going, but they were able to, like, like,
Speaker 1: it's not really that much more complicated than than than
Speaker 1: sucking oil out of the earth and selling it. So
Speaker 1: like I think theoretically this could have been a really
Speaker 1: significant industry for Iraq. Like, if they had actually built
Speaker 1: this thing, they could have made a lot of money
Speaker 1: shooting satellites into space very very cheaply. They would have
Speaker 1: literally been they would have literally been the little guy's
Speaker 1: satellite launching platform. They could have democratized satellite launch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's interesting to think if he hadn't done some
Speaker 1: of the especially like hadn't done some of the the
Speaker 1: aggressive things that he had done, or and and was
Speaker 1: asked to do in some cases by the CIA. If
Speaker 1: Iraq had built this thing and started launching cheap satellites
Speaker 1: and we had gotten to like the nineties and the
Speaker 1: Internet era, and there had been fucking Iraq willing to
Speaker 1: put a satellite into space for goddamn nothing, and for anybody,
Speaker 1: maybe a really interesting set of changes to like what
Speaker 1: happens on the Internet, Like who the funk knows where
Speaker 1: that could have gone. Yeah, it's starling sooner um. Now,
Speaker 1: of course Saddam Hussein was Saddam Hussein, and everyone who
Speaker 1: found out about the supergun immediately assumed he was going
Speaker 1: to use it to shoot at people, um, because and
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing. Maybe he is Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 1: He does a lot of shooting at people. He's also
Speaker 1: it's a bad weapon, Like it's people who will talk
Speaker 1: about like was he planning to use as a weapon
Speaker 1: will point out like it's one of the worst things
Speaker 1: you can imagine as a weapon system because planes exist, Right,
Speaker 1: maybe he could have like shot at Iran with it,
Speaker 1: and Iraq had air had, you know, at least during
Speaker 1: points in the war air superiority. But like if he
Speaker 1: had thought to like fire and Israel or even Kuwait, like,
Speaker 1: you could blow this thing up very easily. It's not.
Speaker 1: It can't defend itself. It cannot be hidden, It is
Speaker 1: extremely obvious where it's firing from, and it can't really
Speaker 1: move like it's not a good weapons system. Um So,
Speaker 1: I kind of I'm kind of the opinion that yet, yeah,
Speaker 1: he might not have wanted it as a weapon. He
Speaker 1: might have wanted to like shoot ship into space. Um
Speaker 1: And that was when people who would like in converse
Speaker 1: stations with their weapons designers, they would be like, well,
Speaker 1: are you worried that he's going to use this to
Speaker 1: like shoot whatever other country? Geraldill be like, well, why,
Speaker 1: it would just be throwing your gun away. It's gonna
Speaker 1: get bombed and it'll be useless then. Um so. And
Speaker 1: it is one of those things I should probably talk
Speaker 1: about what the recoil on this thing would have been,
Speaker 1: because it is not possible to fire without the entire
Speaker 1: world noticing. The recoil force from shooting this gun once
Speaker 1: would have totaled twenty seven thousand tons, which is equivalent
Speaker 1: to a small nuclear blast. Shooting this thing would have
Speaker 1: been a seismic event detectable in every country on Earth
Speaker 1: like it. It's hard to overstate what a big fucking
Speaker 1: canon this would have been. But you know what if
Speaker 1: it wasn't the cannon itself to be used as a weapon,
Speaker 1: but what if it was to shoot weapons into space?
Speaker 1: I mean that that's that is the thing, and that's
Speaker 1: actually what one of the one one of Saddam Hussein's
Speaker 1: members of government argues that that was the purpose. It
Speaker 1: wasn't meant to be used as like field artillery. So
Speaker 1: I'm like, what years are we talking right now? This
Speaker 1: is a yeah, this is like the eight I mean
Speaker 1: we're talking to Star Wars area. Yeah, I mean so
Speaker 1: it makes sense yeah, um and in general, Hussein Camel
Speaker 1: al Magi, a former head of a RACKS weapons development program,
Speaker 1: later said quote, it was meant for a long for
Speaker 1: long range attack and also to blind spy satellites. Our
Speaker 1: scientists were seriously working on that. It was designed to
Speaker 1: explode a shell in space that would have sprayed a
Speaker 1: sticky material on the satellite and blinded it. And that's
Speaker 1: that does seem like maybe more plausible. It's a glue
Speaker 1: gun from cash. He was paid a big glue gun.
Speaker 1: He's made of these They're going to shoot the German
Speaker 1: shells up that glue all the piece seventeens together, and
Speaker 1: they followed the earth. Just Saddam, who's saying, like drunk
Speaker 1: at one in the morning watching a Spiderman cartoon and
Speaker 1: getting on the forum. I have an idea or read
Speaker 1: cass like, this is a good idea. You can just
Speaker 1: glue the satelleite together and they'll fall to the earth.
Speaker 1: It's very funny. I don't know how much I believe
Speaker 1: what Hussein Camel al Magite is saying, because he's one
Speaker 1: of a number of guys who defects from Saddam's government
Speaker 1: to Jordan to work with the u N. And like,
Speaker 1: some of those guys were telling truth about something, but
Speaker 1: they were also all liars who had been part of
Speaker 1: like the Baptist administration, had been fine with Saddam until
Speaker 1: they pissed him off and thought that they were going
Speaker 1: to get killed, at which point they fled and you know,
Speaker 1: turned on him in order to get a better deal themselves.
Speaker 1: Like none of them are trustworthy people, is what I
Speaker 1: will say about all of these. There's a number of
Speaker 1: these generals who like defect some of like the bullshit
Speaker 1: we get during the second invasion of Iraq is because
Speaker 1: these guys who defect from the Iraqi government and make
Speaker 1: these very lurid claims about Iraqi weapons systems that are
Speaker 1: not true. I'm not convinced Saddam actually wanted to use
Speaker 1: this his weapon at all. He's not a dumb guy.
Speaker 1: He does make some dumb calls, but I think that, like,
Speaker 1: he's probably probably thinking, like, we can make a funkload
Speaker 1: of money with this thing. You might have legitimately just
Speaker 1: wanted to be part of the space race. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: would have been cool. Yeah, Um, he was that kind
Speaker 1: of dude. I kind of think he might have not
Speaker 1: had violent intent with this thing. He might have just
Speaker 1: wanted to get make a shipload of money. Um, who knows.
Speaker 1: And May of nineteen nine, Baby Babylon, a forty five
Speaker 1: meter long prototype, was finished, finished and mounted on a hillside. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: parts for the big guns started being made in Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain,
Speaker 1: Switzerland and Italy. Once again, this was all extremely illegal.
Speaker 1: You're not allowed to sell Saddam like new weapons systems.
Speaker 1: You are certainly not allowed to build him a cannon
Speaker 1: that could shoot space like that is very against the law,
Speaker 1: so they're hiding all of this is like industrial equipment
Speaker 1: for like reservoirs and ship like, Oh, we need these
Speaker 1: big tubes for some like civil engineering projects, so we
Speaker 1: can have them made in the UK that the British
Speaker 1: don't know these tubes are meaning to be a fucking
Speaker 1: gun barrel, though of course they do know because none
Speaker 1: of this they don't keep this a secret very well.
Speaker 1: So this gun gets under construction like five different countries
Speaker 1: and it's actually coming together. Gerald bulls the dream of
Speaker 1: his entire life of decades. He has the backing, he
Speaker 1: has the place to do it, has the technology. He
Speaker 1: is going to make his super gun. But his good
Speaker 1: luck doesn't last Carl, because on March two, nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: Gerald Bull suffered a significant setback. He was shot three
Speaker 1: times in the back of the head with a silenced
Speaker 1: pistol outside of his apartment in Brussels. That tends to
Speaker 1: put a hitch in your playoff. Yeah, that's really gonna
Speaker 1: that that'll that'll that'll really interrupt your your your weapon
Speaker 1: design goals. Very few gun designers have continued to work
Speaker 1: after being shot three times in the back of the
Speaker 1: head with a silence pistol. I gotta say, the minute
Speaker 1: you told me that the first thing that popped on
Speaker 1: my head. And I don't know the story, so I'm
Speaker 1: curious to where this is going to go. But the
Speaker 1: minute I heard that, I thought Massad. That's what everyone thinks, right,
Speaker 1: that that is the number one assumed culprit um. There
Speaker 1: are no witnesses obviously, right, which is also makes you
Speaker 1: think massade because they're pretty good at killing people. Um,
Speaker 1: no one has ever been charged with his murder um.
Speaker 1: Whatever kind of suppressory they were using on the gun
Speaker 1: was good enough that like nobody even hears this, they
Speaker 1: find him later. You know what's in thinking about that,
Speaker 1: as the Massad was known for using suppress pretty good chance. Yea.
Speaker 1: I have not found direct information on what caliber he
Speaker 1: was shot with, but I would not be surprised. That said,
Speaker 1: there are some other possibilities. When police arrive at the scene,
Speaker 1: they find his key in the door in a brief
Speaker 1: case with twenty dollars in cash, so everyone knows immediately
Speaker 1: like this is not a robbery, right, And it may
Speaker 1: even be that like they made sure to leave cash
Speaker 1: on him to let people know like this is as
Speaker 1: a message to other people, like this was not a robbery.
Speaker 1: He he was making this kind of ship for Saddam,
Speaker 1: and that's not okay. If you don't want to get
Speaker 1: shot in the back of the head, don't make fucking
Speaker 1: guns for Saddam Hussein. UM would not be surprised that
Speaker 1: if if it is the Massad, that would be very
Speaker 1: within kind of the Massad's operating principles. Um. Now. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because the people who suspect a Massad the
Speaker 1: most reasonable expectation is not because he was building them
Speaker 1: a super gun, but because he was also working to
Speaker 1: improve Iraqi ballistic missiles. Like they were worried about the scuds. Basically,
Speaker 1: they didn't care about this. They recognized to the big
Speaker 1: cannon is not a great weapons system. Um. They're worried
Speaker 1: that he's going to make the scuds more accurate, and
Speaker 1: he's Saddam's gonna you know, shell Tel Aviv again or whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: But really it's also worth noting the Massada is the
Speaker 1: what most people assume it could have been, literally anyone.
Speaker 1: The CIA has a tone of reasons to want this
Speaker 1: guy dead, right, so does UK intelligence. He's building his
Speaker 1: gun in the UK South African intelligence has a lot
Speaker 1: of reason to want this guy dead at this point. Um,
Speaker 1: two weeks after his death, UK customs seized parts of
Speaker 1: the supergun before they could leave ports, So there's even
Speaker 1: an argument to be made that like maybe this is
Speaker 1: a British operation, right, they find out what he's doing,
Speaker 1: that he's doing it with like their manufacturers, they kill
Speaker 1: him and they seize his gun. Um and yeah, who knows,
Speaker 1: We have no idea who killed him. Massad is probably
Speaker 1: like the smart money, but he really he had piste
Speaker 1: off basically everyone with the capacity to carry off a hit.
Speaker 1: So it could have been might have been fucking Iraq.
Speaker 1: Maybe he had some sort of falling out with Saddam.
Speaker 1: You know, they had an argument over the Dinny table
Speaker 1: one night and that was the end of up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was definitely. You gotta say one thing about Gerald Bull.
Speaker 1: He gave a lot of people reasons to want him dead.
Speaker 1: It's like, I'm trying to understand the moral of the story.
Speaker 1: Is it is? It is the moral the story? You
Speaker 1: should not necessarily be a a moral arms dealer, weapons designer,
Speaker 1: or is the moral of the story. Follow your dreams
Speaker 1: and you'll get chipped in the back of the head
Speaker 1: three times with a suppress pointy two, I think, which
Speaker 1: both of them are morals. Probably the wisest thing if
Speaker 1: you have a dream is to maybe, even if you
Speaker 1: have a beautiful dream, you should not follow that dream
Speaker 1: to the point that leads you to make artillery for
Speaker 1: apartheid South Africa and a space gun for Saddam. Who's saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe at that point you should have a moment of
Speaker 1: self revelation to go. You know what, Maybe I'm the
Speaker 1: baddie when you keep sitting down in meetings with Saddam
Speaker 1: hus saying you should probably thinking Donna Rumsfeld should have
Speaker 1: come to this conclusion too. I might be making some
Speaker 1: bad steps here. Yeah, these are some odd life is.
Speaker 1: How did I get here today? I don't feel good
Speaker 1: about consistently being in a room with this. And Yeah,
Speaker 1: shortly after Gerald's assassination, Iraq invades Kuwait and the dream
Speaker 1: of the super gun dies at least for now. You know,
Speaker 1: we have the plans, we have the technology. We could
Speaker 1: build the biggest gun anyone has ever built and use
Speaker 1: it to shoot satellites or goo into space. I like
Speaker 1: the idea. I think goo and space has been a
Speaker 1: completely unexplored reality. I think we as Americans need something
Speaker 1: to bind us together again, and maybe we could build
Speaker 1: I don't know what, the Mountaineer. We build a big
Speaker 1: gun on the side of Mountaineer and we use it
Speaker 1: to shoot the fucking moon. Well, I would think if
Speaker 1: we were going to do it in true American style,
Speaker 1: we would do it like Mount Rushmore. We would take
Speaker 1: something that was on a reservation and destroy indigenous location,
Speaker 1: the Holy Mountain of sorts. That coil is going to
Speaker 1: destroy everything sacred around. So if you want, if you
Speaker 1: want to do it right, we have to do it
Speaker 1: someplace that's on Indigenous land, and that would be of
Speaker 1: the truly American way. We could call it colonialism the gun, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then we can use it to shoot settlers onto Mars,
Speaker 1: which we then funk up. That's true. You know. One
Speaker 1: life goal, I guess is to live long enough to
Speaker 1: be around to experience or learn about the first gunfight
Speaker 1: on Mars, because would get us there sooner. Yeah, we could.
Speaker 1: We could shoot people and guns onto Mars with our
Speaker 1: big gun that we've built to shoot things into Mars.
Speaker 1: All things come back to guns and giant foulic symbols.
Speaker 1: Don't they. Yeah, it is a pretty like It is
Speaker 1: definitely not surprising that Saddam hears about this man's dream
Speaker 1: and says, I will absolutely build that big stupid gun
Speaker 1: in my country. You can, you can put it anywhere.
Speaker 1: I want the biggest, longest, largest thing to shoot goo
Speaker 1: with ever made. Yeah. How would a big long gun
Speaker 1: to shoot go into space? It is kind of like
Speaker 1: the fundamental desire of every dictator. Yeah, I want you
Speaker 1: to build me a big penis with a twenty seven
Speaker 1: thousand tons of recoil that can shoot all over my
Speaker 1: enemy's satellites, which are basically their eyes. You know. Saddam
Speaker 1: just wanted to give a facial to all of the
Speaker 1: countries that had angered. We just we just came to
Speaker 1: the true conclusion. It was the Iraqi space bookaky gun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Iraki space Bokaki cannon. Uh fucking hell um. All right, Carl, Well,
Speaker 1: that is the episode that That's what I got for you.
Speaker 1: This was a real treat, I have to I mean,
Speaker 1: I had heard about space cannons before, but I did
Speaker 1: not know all of these stories. And I mean I
Speaker 1: had also been obviously very familiar with Maxim's work, but
Speaker 1: not maximumself and the parallels between this are quite interesting
Speaker 1: really when you think about people that are so driven
Speaker 1: by their goal that they lose the morality in the process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is one of those things when you talk
Speaker 1: about the inevitability of such things. Yeah, when you have
Speaker 1: people that are that dedicated, like no one was ever.
Speaker 1: The only way to stop Gerald Bull from making bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger guns was to shoot him three times in
Speaker 1: the back of the head. Like he was. He wasn't
Speaker 1: he was. He was so driven to keep making those things, um,
Speaker 1: which is is fascinating and it is also like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it also brings you back to that thought I mean
Speaker 1: those thought experiments that never actually can truly be explored
Speaker 1: besides just thinking about them because we don't know what
Speaker 1: the reality would be. But what if he had been
Speaker 1: given the opportunity to make his space gun without turning
Speaker 1: into this international arms designer and dealer. You know, if
Speaker 1: if if Canada said, you know what, go for it,
Speaker 1: make that big thing. We want to launch Google into
Speaker 1: space and he had just gone down that path, Yeah, perhaps,
Speaker 1: I mean it could have changed everything. What if what
Speaker 1: if Hitler had sold his paintings, right, I mean, who
Speaker 1: the funk knows it could have changed the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think the main thing that would if
Speaker 1: he built his big space gun in Canada, motherfucker would
Speaker 1: probably be a billionaire because it seems like it would
Speaker 1: have worked and it would have been that Like, that's
Speaker 1: just an insane amount of money if you can make
Speaker 1: it that much cheaper to put satellites in space. Not
Speaker 1: only that, what would what would the butterfly effect be
Speaker 1: for the technology of could now launch into space low cost?
Speaker 1: I mean that could have changed things in a very
Speaker 1: humanitarian way. Yeah, it is really interesting to like think about.
Speaker 1: And again, I am kind of from a from an
Speaker 1: alternative science fiction standpoint, fascinated the possibility of like you
Speaker 1: have the Internet boom and Iraq is letting anybody with
Speaker 1: two grand put a tiny satellite into space? What what
Speaker 1: does that do? Like? What how is that different? How
Speaker 1: was like piracy different? If the Pirate Bay could just
Speaker 1: like launch satellites into space for a few grand apiece,
Speaker 1: and like what does that change about like the late nineties,
Speaker 1: early two thousand's and all of these Like it is
Speaker 1: kind of a fascinating question um to think about. It
Speaker 1: could have been pretty weird or Saddam would have done
Speaker 1: something chetty, who knows. I would like to think it
Speaker 1: would have done something amazing. It would have brought great
Speaker 1: technology to the world. But in reality we probably would
Speaker 1: have ended up with four chan in space. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it again it is Saddam Hussein, So you shouldn't expect
Speaker 1: things to go to wealth like he is the guy
Speaker 1: that he is. He probably he may have just sold
Speaker 1: it all to the Disney Corporation in order to shut
Speaker 1: down any ability to broadcast non Disney products. We could
Speaker 1: live in a global dictatorship of Disney enforced by Saddam's
Speaker 1: space penis. Well, we're kind of close to that already.
Speaker 1: It's just two different mechanisms. Look Disney again, it trends
Speaker 1: enforces right like, even without the space gun, Disney found
Speaker 1: a way, Life finds a way. The corporate oligarchy finds
Speaker 1: a way with or without a gun to shoot go
Speaker 1: into space with. I do want to see that fucking
Speaker 1: thing fire nine tons of propellant, like I wonder, I mean, honestly, legitimately,
Speaker 1: just firing that thing, how much like damage in the
Speaker 1: surrounding environment would happen from the concussion is hard to fathom.
Speaker 1: You would have and that every possible living thing away
Speaker 1: from it, right, I mean you, you would have to
Speaker 1: have like a couple of miles clear um, because it's
Speaker 1: just too funny. You can't be near that thing. It's
Speaker 1: not like hearing protection doesn't even matter at that point.
Speaker 1: It will fucking liquefy you. This will make when the
Speaker 1: MythBusters destroyed a bunch of windows firing one of their
Speaker 1: little things in one of their filming episodes, seem very
Speaker 1: minor by comparison. Yeah, it is. It is a very
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, could have made a pretty good water
Speaker 1: slide too. Um. All right, Carl, that's our episode. You
Speaker 1: got any pluggables to plug? I am my normal pluggable.
Speaker 1: I run in range dot tv. You can find me
Speaker 1: on multiple different distribution points. One of my big things
Speaker 1: that I did long ago is demonetize my work because
Speaker 1: I believe it's completely fewer supported, therefore no sponsors in
Speaker 1: the overlords and UH got a lot of hype once
Speaker 1: when I decided to publish my content on porn hubs.
Speaker 1: So at any rate, if you want to see gun
Speaker 1: content that's a little bit outside of the norm, you
Speaker 1: can find me an range dot tv. Excellent. Well check
Speaker 1: that out. Yeah, so my book is now available for
Speaker 1: preorder After the Revolution, my novel. You can pre order
Speaker 1: it with an autographed book plate in the front of
Speaker 1: the book right now at a k press dot org
Speaker 1: slash after the Revolution with a datch, or if you
Speaker 1: just google a K Press after the Revolution and you'll
Speaker 1: find it. That's the easy way to do it. Just
Speaker 1: google after the Revolution, a K Press, pre order my book.
Speaker 1: It'll come signed. Um, so that's pretty cool. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's gonna do it for us here at Bombing the
Speaker 1: Bastards for today, Sophie. We're not going to bind the lives.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. I'm not doing it either. I do it
Speaker 1: every episode. I don't. All right, we're donning nailed it.