Behind the Bastards - The Man Who Built A Gun To Shoot Space

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Robert is joined by Karl Kasarda to discuss gun designer, Gerald Bull. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And this week, we are talking about some very creative men who like to design them some weapons. My guests this episode, as with last episode, Carl Casarta from InRangeTV. Carl, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I'm sitting here contemplating my future with a Maxim machine gun. Teach me more about something that I probably need in my life that I'm not aware of. Well, yeah, I mean, this would be a little bit harder to, the weapons we're talking about today would be slightly harder to acquire than a Maxim gun and require somewhat more space. As a spoiler

for where we're going, you will need a hill or a small mountain to properly use this. So, you know, I don't know how much property you have, but maybe set like a good sized hill aside. You'll need about 1000 meters. So as we discussed last episode, here at Maxim may be directly responsible for more deaths via his invention than any other arms designer in history. Now, our next subject was equally brilliant in his ability to design guns. He's probably better at it than Hiram was. He may be better at it than anybody was. The fact that his creations killed fewer people is not through lack of trying, although his goal was never to make weapons of war. That was just kind of an unnecessary aside to the thing he

really wanted to do. The guy we're talking about today is Gerald Bull. And when I say guns here, we're talking about the big stuff like artillery pieces. We're not talking about anything you can fit in a jacket, you know. Gerald Vincent Bull was born on March 9, 1928 in North Bay, Ontario. You may recognize this as being part of Canada. And the fact that two of the three great gun designers in North American history were from nowhere near the south is a fact of some shame from my people. Browning was born in what, Utah? So, yeah, still. Come on, South. Somebody figure something out. But enough of that. Gerald's father was George Toussaint Bull. He was a lawyer, and he and his wife were very productive during the brief time that they were alive,

spreading a lot of kids out over the land, 10 children. They were quite comfortable financially for a little while until about a year after Gerald was born when the stock market crashed, you know, 1929. Not a great year for anybody, really. George had taken out a bunch of loans for investments during the bull market, and he wound up broke when they came due after the crash. The family had to move to Toronto for work. Now, Gertrude Bull, Gerald's mother, kept having kids, and she suffered severe complications after giving birth to her 10th child. So, Gerald was kid number nine. A couple years later, she has child number 10, Gordon, and it doesn't go great. She dies in April of 1931, which sets Gerald's dad, George,

on a sharp decline. He becomes an alcoholic, he has a nervous breakdown, and he abandons his children and leaves them with his sister, Laura, who dies almost immediately afterwards. So, by the time Gerald is five, he has had, he's been through the ringer. That's a rough set of cards to draw as a five-year-old child. Wow. Yeah. You kind of wonder how that influences someone to their adulthood, right? I mean, losing your mother, you're essentially part of a litter. You don't have brothers and sisters who have a litter. Yeah, you've got a litter. Your dad just fucks right off. Your second mom dies like, it's not great. No, it's not great. Yeah. And we will talk a little bit about how this influences him, but definitely not a stable

upbringing, right? So, George, his dad, falls in love with somebody else, gets married, and does not take his children back once he's married in a more stable position. Instead, after his sister dies, he gives up his kids to an assortment of relatives. He just kind of like splits them and then goes off and does his own thing. He's like, I don't want these kids around anymore. I'm trying to do in a new life. You get a kid. You get a kid. You get a kid. Everyone gets a kid. You know the rule. Your mom's dead. I ain't your dad anymore. That's how this shit works. Gotta find me another uterus to destroy.

Yeah, we don't get a ton of detail about George Bull, but he definitely sucks pretty bad. Jared winds up being raised largely by his older sister, Bernice. And when he was nine or 10, he starts spending the summer with his aunt and uncle who were well off and able to send him to an all-boys Jesuit school. So, he does have a large family who takes care of them. He's kind of an orphan, but he's taken care of by his family who are comfortable enough that he's not a financial burden to them. And they actually put a lot of resources into him. So, it is a rough childhood. It's not nearly as bad as it could be, right? He doesn't wind up in an institution or something. He has a loving family. His dad is just a massive piece of shit.

So, he starts doing better at this point once he gets to the Jesuit school, and he shows an aptitude for engineering. He had a hobby of designing and building model airplanes out of balsa wood. Not like a kit for an airplane. He would just get raw wood and he would make his own planes and fly them. So, Gerald graduates in 1944, and he was accepted to Queen's University. His initial plan was to join the military as an officer, but he found himself really, really taken by engineering. He transferred to the University of Toronto, where he'd been accepted by their new Aeronautical Engineering School. This was an undergraduate program, and Gerald was 16 years old when he starts it, right? So, he is not just in college,

he's in a graduate program for aeronautical engineering when he's a 16-year-old. So, very, very smart kid, right? And also a very ambitious kid, but the uncertainty and abandonment in his childhood had left keen marks on him. Classmates noted that he could be difficult to work with and prone to anger, something that would be commented on by his peers for the rest of his life. Charles Murphy, who worked closely with Gerald as an adult, later told interviewers, in a sense, he was an orphan, and that affected his personality a lot. He wanted people to like him, and he felt hurt and rejection keenly. And kind of like Maxim, he's one of these guys that when someone wrongs him or he sees someone is wrong, he never is able to let this shit go. They're

both men who take, which I find interesting, who take slights extremely personally and like, cannot deal with the idea that somebody has wronged them. Boll's program was funded by the Defense Research Board of Canada, and his first project as a student was to build a supersonic wind tunnel. He used this as the basis for his 1949 master's thesis, and by 1950, he'd almost finished his PhD thesis, which is an insane rate of productivity for a young academic, going from master's to PhD thesis in the space of about a year. He is a really smart kid. Now, that year, the DRB asked the school to provide them with an aerodynamicist for a missile project, codenamed Velvet Glove. He proved to be exceptional at practical engineering, and Gerald Boll was

quickly selected to participate in this joint Canadian British Defense Department program to study artillery and develop new methods for shooting people with big guns. The program that he worked with next had been started during World War II in Canada to keep British weapons developments out of German hands. And now that the Cold War was on, the purpose of the program switched to ensure that the Commonwealth had the most accurate artillery possible that they could use if things got hot again. He helped to design some of the first segmented aluminum Sabo rounds. He's like the guy who really is a heavy part of obviously its teams, but he's one of the people who invents the concept of a Sabo round and makes it actually

effective. And that's when you have a big smoothbore gun, and there's basically rifling in this Sabo thing that gets discarded as the shell travels out of the barrel. And it allows you to do things like later on, they'll do stuff like the artillery piece will almost be a rocket. And when the Sabo is discarded, wings pop out or fins pop out that allow it to like stay more aerodynamic. Like the fact that you have this, that you build this discarding Sabo system allows you to do all sorts of stuff with artillery rounds that people couldn't really do before. It'll also enhance the capabilities of existing artillery because you're taking on existing smoothbore and by changing the projectile, you're probably giving it higher accuracy and greater

range. Yeah, that's exact. And that's exactly a big part of this is, you know, the militaries and whatnot are always like there's always budgetary concerns. We have all these big guns. The Sabo allows us to massively upgrade their capacity. And we don't have to actually make new fucking guns, which nobody really wants to deal with. So yeah, he helps design some of these the first of these rounds. He also helps to design new methods for testing powerful artillery. That's much more like the artillery they're making shoot so much further and faster than it ever has. They have to invent new ways to decide to figure out how fast they're shooting it, right? Like they didn't actually have the equipment to determine how fast are we firing these shells because they never needed to.

So he's he's not just making the rounds. He's also helping to figure out how are we actually going to analyze and test this stuff because that needs to be invented right alongside it. In 1951, at age 21, he gets his PhD becoming one of the youngest PhDs in the university's history to this day. So life's pretty good for bull during this period. On a fishing trip in the early 50s, he meets the daughter of a local doctor, Naomi Gilbert. The two start dating and then get married in 1954. Her father gave the couple a house as their wedding gift. And the very next year, their first son, Philip was born. Michelle followed soon after. Now, Gerald was exceptional enough at what he did that in 1953, he received attention from McLean's magazine, which titled him Canada's

Boy Rocket Scientist. His cantankerous nature, though, increasingly asserted itself as a fundamentally pragmatic experiment driven scientist. He expressed hatred for theoretical researchers who he called cocktail scientists. He also grew increasingly furious with red tape, which restricted the kind of weapons projects that he could embark on. So he's he really hates anyone who's not getting their hands dirty actually like making shit. He has no time at all for like theoretical physics or anything like that. He wants to go out and build things. And if you're not doing that, he thinks you're kind of full of shit. Well, that kind of smells like I'm the smartest guy in the room sort of simplex complex. Does it not like all these other people are just

holding me back, get out of my way and watch what I can do. He's probably a narcissist. Like you can't diagnose someone based on this, but he has and he's he's he's a genius. But he also has this extremely high opinion of himself and gets enraged whenever someone is like, No, we don't really want you to do that. I wonder, I mean, I wonder, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I wonder how much that comes back to being sort of discarded as a child. Yeah, yeah, I really I mean, it's it's it's interesting to think about like it's it must have had some sort of impact. And yeah, he really he never is able to handle being told no. So an early example of both of these things came in 1955 when Bull was working on a smoothbore gun that could fire explosive

rounds at 4550 miles per hour. This would be the fastest and most accurate artillery piece ever made. Now, to make his gun work, he had to design a special telemetry system to even collect data on how the weapon functioned. His plans to do this were considered impossible by staff at the organization he was working at. And several of them went to the mat to try to stop bull from moving forward to thwart them. He sneakily moved his department's funding around paying for the project under their noses. And it worked. Bull continued his work more or less without fanfare for the next decade, experimenting with anti ballistic missiles and radar, eventually impressing the director of the US Army Research and Development Division enough that a model of one of bull's guns was brought

to the states and test fired over the Atlantic. The US team had to use the fire control radar from a Nike Hercules missile to track the shells fired by bull's gun, which reached altitudes of 130,000 feet. So this is like, this is a gun that shoots at such ranges and so quickly that you have to use like the radar systems on a fucking missile to track the projectiles it fires. It's fascinating because like I was just kind of making a joke about being the smartest guy in the room, but he might legitimately have been the smartest guy in the room. He's very smart. Yeah. Like when we say he's making guns, he's making like, he's making like fantasy weapons. Like these are, these are extremely advanced weapon platforms. So at this point, yeah,

he's making guns that can basically fire into space. Like he's, he's way, he's making weapons that can shoot projectiles damn near into orbit. Sounds like something you'd read in a Jules Verne novel. Yeah. He must have liked Jules Verne as a kid. And his work here was as much rocket science as it was anything like what Maxim and other men were doing a generation or two earlier, right? And so in like, literally like a generation or two, we've gone from making a water cooled gun that, that is recoil thought operated to I am shooting missiles into the, into space. It is again, just like a mark of how quickly things change. Now it was at this point in the late 1950s that Bull and his colleague and friend Gerald Murphy started talking about doing

something totally new with their cannons. Instead of just firing munitions, might it be possible to use them to launch aircraft? They started with model airplanes. And when I say model airplanes, scale models of airplanes, one one scale models of airplanes, that they are shooting out of cannons to see like, can we launch fucking planes this way? One of the weapon, one of the planes they launched through a cannon this way is a supersonic jet called the Avro Aero. Bull's work yielded early results and it actually revealed a flaw in like one of the stabilization systems in the arrow because they were shooting it so quickly that leads to this very important safety upgrade in the plane that makes it a lot safer to fly. So there's immediate results to this, but the

Institute he's working at cancels the program immediately after like this. And he's enraged again, right? He wants to keep shooting planes out of guns and the university is like, no, we feel like that's all we need to know about shooting a plane out of a gun. Like so we're going to take your funding away and he's livid, you know, in his eyes, these cocktail scientists have robbed him of a chance to do a thing he thought was cool. It does sound like a lot of fun. It does sound, it fucking sounds rad as hell. Yeah, absolutely. I would have loved to get to hang out and just watch him shoot planes out of guns. That sounds neat. So in 1957, Russia does a Sputnik, which we today see as rad, but Americans and a lot of Canadians found terrifying at the time and there's

this whole mania over. Well, now we got to get a fucking satellite up there, right? This is all space race stuff. Everybody's probably broadly familiar with this. So Gerald Bull takes this as an opportunity and he leaks a story to the press that Canada was about to put their own Sputnik type satellite into orbit by building a high velocity cannon into the nose of a redstone missile. Now, this was a complete lie, but he wanted to make this thing. So he figured I leak this to the press. There will be a frenzy in Canada for me to launch a satellite and then I'll get to build this. And again, this is one of the most insane ideas I've ever heard. He's talking about like a nuclear ballistic missile and you replace the explosive in it with a gun

built into the front of the missile so that the missile shoots up into the sky and then the gun fires the satellite into space from the missile. So that's the second stage essentially. It's a fucking insane idea. And he's also like really incredibly playing the media. It's truly fascinating. Like he sees, he's looking at this missile the size of a fucking building and goes, I bet I could stick a fucking gun in that and that'd be pretty tough. And if I put this out in the news and say Canada's making it and they don't make it, it'll embarrass them. So now they have to make it. Well, that was his hope. It doesn't quite work out. So the leaked story was obviously a calculated act, but it causes an uproar in the Canadian government. And the prime

minister, a guy named Diefenbaker, loudly denounces the idea as bogus to the press. So it does not work for him and heads rolled in Bull's office. But the hubbub also led to massive press interest in the Canadian armament and research development establishment or card, which is where he was working at the time. And the subsequent, a lot of the media coverage that comes out of this, this leak and the bruja around it focuses on guns that Gerald Bold had built. So he doesn't get his wish. He doesn't get to build his missile gun, but he gets a lot of interest in his, the guns that he he's already built. So it does kind of work out for him. By the end of the 50s, Bull was fed up with the timidity of his superiors. In April of 1961, he had an argument with one of his bosses who

wanted him to complete paperwork before moving on to actually testing stuff. Bull asked his boss, which is more important, paperwork or getting the work done? And his boss said, in this case, paperwork. So Bull responded, you want paperwork? I'll give you paperwork. And he wrote out his resignation right there on the spot. So he he stops working for the university, the Canadian government, this like big joint project. Yeah, you get a sense of like the kind of duty. I have to admit, having a career in security, I totally get that. I can't tell you how many change control documents I never filled out, right? I can't fucking handle that shit. I just wanted to make routers do stuff and make firewalls go. I didn't want to make paperwork go. I get that. Yeah,

I mean, fuck paperwork. Like, it's hard not to be on his side with some of this, just like, yeah, that it's I, of course, it would be frustrating if all you want to do is build guns into the into missiles and shoot them into space. If somebody wants you to fill out a fucking requisition form, that's just useful time you could spend making your space guns. So according to the book Wilderness of Mirrors, a report, which is a book about Gerald Bull, a Canadian army intelligence report on bull that came out after his death later analyzed this incident that led to him quitting card and concluded his tempestuous nature and strongest like for administration and red tape constantly led him into trouble with senior management.

And this is true. And you get the feeling that however, understandable, some of this may have been, he was a he was an asshole to work with, like he was not an easy man to have as a colleague. Bull transitioned pretty seamlessly to a professorship at McGill University, where he kept helped to carry out more experiments with aerodynamics and big guns. He and his wife actually purchased a 2000 acre plot of land on the Quebec, Vermont border, which they donated to McGill University to use as a ballistics lab to like uses a shooting range. Bull quickly received funding from Project Harp, which stood for high altitude research project. It was a joint operation by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Canadian equivalent. And the

goal was to study the ballistics of reentry using large guns to fire projectiles at high speed and then watching those projectiles fall back to earth. So right, this is part of the space race. They know we're going to be launching shit up and we're going to need some of it to come back without killing people in it. So we need to shoot a bunch of stuff up and into the atmosphere and then let it fall and take data on like what happens when shit falls because we haven't done that before. And the most efficient way they can think of to do that is these giant guns that Gerald Bull has been building. He's like, well, yeah, we don't need to we don't need to actually be getting it into space. We just want to look at what's happening like aerodynamically as these

things land. Let's have him shoot a bunch of stuff up and take notes on it. Are there bonus points if the projectiles land on a small Polynesian island? It's not written about here, but maybe, yeah, maybe. And these are not like ballistic route. Like these are guns that could be used as artillery, but they're they're like little models and stuff that they're basically shooting and monitoring at this point. And Bull's work here is very successful and he's very supported by his boss, the head of McGill's engineering department, Donald Mordell. Other professors described quote second rate attempts at manipulation by Bull to secure more resources for his work. This was unnecessary as Mordell believed in Bull's projects, but he was constantly needled anyway in this war

at him. So again, even when he's really supported by his boss, he can't like he's he's never shows any gratitude for the stuff that he's getting. He's always just like, no, no, I want more, I want more, I want to be able to do more. He's just, you know, not not a I mean, he's also a very motivated guy. And so he just kind of has this. Some of it's being very prickly and a dick. Some of it's just he's got this very relentless belief in his projects and can't really stand the thought of not moving forward on them. Now Bull's work for harp was wildly successful. His cannons worked even better than intended for the people funding the research. The primary goal here was just to further the space race. The guns existed to provide data on how different things re entered

the atmosphere. But Gerald Bull didn't think of things that way. He believed his guns were the real stars of the show. And he starts to think about he starts to have more and more ideas around this like, well, I don't really like the fact that the gun is just sort of a thing to study the ballistics of shit falling. I think the gun, I think these guns I'm building can really be like the basis of a new of the whole space program. That's that's that's how he increasingly starts to think. Now, what happens next is influenced by something that happens in 1965. And to tell that story, I'm going to read a quote from a write up in the New York Times. A middle-aged German woman arrived in Montreal to visit a relatively unknown scientist McGill University

Space Research Institute. The scientist was Professor Gerald Bull, then 37. The German woman who sought bull out was the daughter of an engineer who had worked on the top secret Paris gun project during the First World War. Developed by Krupp, the German steel makers, the Paris gun was an enormous howitzer with a range of 74 miles, double that of any weapon than existing. First fired on the morning of March 23, 1918, during Germany's spring offensive, it instantly brought terror to Paris's placid outer these months. The first round hit the Palace of the Republic. The French aghast and mystified sent intelligence officers into the woods surrounding the city in search of a hidden German gun emplacement. On Good Friday, March 29, the gun scored a hit on

the Church of Saint-Gervais in central Paris, killing 91 and injuring 100. The Paris gun came too late to turn the tide of the First World War in Germany's favor, but it was an incredible technical triumph for its inventor, Fritz Rausenberger, Krupp's head of artillery development and production. Even with the relatively primitive technology of the time, the shell reached a height of 26 miles, an altitude not exceeded until Germany developed the V2 rocket in World War II. So this woman comes to Canada with papers from Rausenberger's archive. So the Germans, the Paris gun never falls into Allied hands at the end of World War I. It's dismantled and like hidden or destroyed, and nobody knows how this thing was fucking built, right? Because it's a

military secret. It doesn't fall on anyone's hands. It's kind of a mystery. The blueprints were lost forever, essentially. But this German woman has an unpublished manuscript from Rausenberger's family archives. And it wasn't the original blueprint, but it had hard data on the gun's capabilities. And it's enough information that Bohl is able to reverse engineer the gun from this and rebuild it via computer model. So he actually gets effectively the plans for the Paris gun by this. I guess this woman who's just like, well, he's, he's building the biggest guns anyone's building. And I think my, my, my ancestor Felix would, would want him to have these plans. Hey, I'm a big fan of giant guns. I hear you're a fan of giant guns. Why don't you give you some

of the secret information so you could build a giant ass gun? Yeah, it's really kind of a weird, like I want to know more about this lady who just like is taken by this quest to help this man build the biggest gun ever. It's such a strange thing to what to do. But I'm going to quote again from the New York Times about what happens next. At that moment, the obsession was born that would dominate Bull's life and determine his death. Bull realized that if the projectile in the huge gun was a powered rocket, its range could be increased dramatically. With the backing of the United States Army, the Canadian Department of Defense Production and McGill University, he established a test site on the island of Barbados and set to work on the high altitude research project.

By welding together two 16 inch guns that had been put in storage by the US Navy, Bull created a huge gun 36 meters long with a diameter of 424 millimeters. It remains the longest working gun ever built. He is, he is the man who's made the biggest gun, at least the longest gun. I don't even know what I mean. I mean, yeah, it's wild, right? I can totally see why he was going down this path and the concept of instead of just using a rocket from the surface to get to space, I mean, making a rocket giving it its boost by just a general ballistic boost with a gun is pretty amazing idea. It is. And he is a weapons designer here, but his goal is not to make a weapon. The weapon, his goal is like, I think the gun should be a platform for space exploration. So again,

nothing like bad that he's done here, like even within the context of like, yeah, it's wild that he's got like the plans for this German apocalypse cannon. But he's using it because he wants to shoot stuff into space, which I would say is a broadly noble aim, wanting to shoot stuff. I mean, there's always like the whole dick measuring of the Cold War, but like, it's cool to put stuff in space. Yeah, it's interesting to think about this. You've got the you've got the Paris gun being used in this instance and the V2 rocket ultimately in von Braun being the Saturn V that gets us to the moon, right? Yeah. I mean, that's that's two different instances of these German weapons of war being turned into space exploration ideas. Yeah, it's interesting that like he, we get

bull, a gun that was made basically so that we could shell random civilian structures in Paris to scare the French winds up becoming the basis of a system to shoot satellites into space. Like that's that is really strange. But I make sense, you know, like obviously, if you can shoot a shell 74 miles, you're not all that far from being able to put something into space, you're well on your way at least, right? Like, yeah, and I believe the V2 was the first thing to actually ever make it into space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. The German arms industry complicated, complicated thing to think about. What a good lot of bad. Speaking of a lot of good, a lot of bad, it's time for a you know, break is heavily supported by the German arms industry. Sophie, this podcast,

oh good. Yeah, we are we are entirely supported by the German munitions industry. So go pick up a something from car, just find some sort of car arm, buy it, or one of those submarines the Germans keep selling the Egyptians for some reason, get one of those. This does explain why this podcast is as hard as Krupp's stall. That's exactly right. That's what everyone says about our podcast. We're the first people anyone said that about. Anyway, here's ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the

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And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic

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there's not really any need for it. Like if you could shoot a thing into space, you've kind of made the biggest gun anyone needs to make. There's not a lot of point to going bigger at that point at that stage. So as the project neared its close, Bol felt he'd perfected plans for a gun launched three stage rocket with flip out fins using the Sabo technology he'd helped work on. That could put a small functional satellite into orbit. He was extremely excited by this idea, as his son, Philippe later recalled, he thought harp would be a big advancement for Canada in aeronautical engineering. They were already putting small probes into space. It was the drive of his life to be working on that project. He was alone. It was his project. It came from his brains and

it was functioning. It worked. And so this is like the high point of his life. But it doesn't last long because on June 30th, 1967, the Canadian government stops funding a harp. Their justification is that they didn't like the idea that their space program would be so closely associated with military hardware. They find it distasteful that their space program involves like gigantic guns, right? They don't like the idea. That's one reason. Another reason is that they're moving towards rockets, right? The vast majority of scientists working in the U.S. and Canada on the space race are all pretty much in agreement that rockets are the way to get shit into space without breaking it. And, you know, Bull is kind of his attitude is like,

well, no, we should do it with gigantic guns. And he's basically the only guy on team giant guns for the space race, right? So obviously, he does not win that argument. And who knows what would have been better, right? Like it worked out more or less. So I'm not going to backseat rocket scientists. Interesting to note the U.S. had no such qualms about the origins of their technology. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah. And I don't I don't like that was one of the reasons that like they gave him. I don't know how much I believe any government would like give a shit about that. But I guess I don't think of governments as I don't think of governments as being basically that altruistic. So that seems odd. Yeah. I mean, maybe it was like maybe there was some PR concern

because he's using some of his technology is this giant Paris gun, which is doesn't have a great history, you know. But yeah. So, right, he the rocket scientists kind of went out over the gun scientists who are basically just Gerald bull. And the New York Times in their write up adds that, bull later admitted that personality clashes had aggravated his budgetary problems. Errigan's was his trademark. And he had made few friends among his government backers. He frequently referred to bureaucrats as morons and the lowest form of life on earth, the abrupt termination of harp devastated bull. He was out in the wilderness, his dream of recreating the Paris guns stillborn. The cocktail scientists had beaten him, but bull was determined to get his

revenge. In an epilogue to the book called studies of ultra performance harp systems, he sketched out plans for an extraordinary new weapon, a launcher 32 inches in diameter that could blast a 1200 pound payload 600 miles into space. I'm sure this is going to take a darker term. But up until now, his disdain for pace for work and his desire to prove this technology with the ultimate goal of launching it's very endearing. It's actually I'm kind of digging the guy at the moment. I'm kind of waiting for the bomb to drop. Yeah, it's about to. But it is like it is. There is something noble about like this man just wanted to build a gun that could shoot stuff into space. I mean, that's a noble goal in itself when you think of the space race.

I mean, we knew this was needed to be done. It's also a pretty cool life ambition. And frankly, if he had gotten it done sooner, maybe we wouldn't have seen would have put Elon Musk into a different line of business. Yeah, we'd be just making cannons to shoot rich people into space. So, bull decided he was done with bureaucrats and cocktail scientists forever. He used his savings and his wife's ample family money to form his own company, the Space Research Corporation of Quebec. This was modeled after the Institute he'd worked for at McGill, but it would be private and not as subject to the whims of government officials. Since harp had been killed, the equipment built for it was being sold for basically nothing. So Bull's new company buys all of this,

including the Barbados gun in the test area for basically nothing. They also get a 20,000 acre site near Quebec. Most of their funding comes from contracts by the US Army or US military, who are not interested in Bull's satellite goals, but are interested in his ability to make big fuck up guns. And his pitch to them was basically like, I built the biggest gun ever want to see if I can make a bigger one. And the US is actually not all that interested in his guns. But as we talked about earlier, they're interested in better artillery shells for their existing guns. And they want Bull to make them nuclear capable artillery shells with a top range of 25 miles, which is fucking nuts. Wanting to shoot a nuke at someone 20 miles away with a field gun is

absolutely mad. Hopefully you can start driving in the opposite direction and have a remote detonator to set it off, right? A remote trigger. Yeah, Gerald, we want you to make a suicide cannon for our boys in Europe. Just something that'll kill everybody around. What's the kill? What's the kill? So we're going to launch this 25 miles. What's the kill radius 50 miles? Oh, this sounds like a great plan. Yeah, cool. Yeah, this is like the early 70s. So you have to assume a lot of cocaine is involved at this point. So Operation Nuke Bullets is a big hit. And even non nuclear versions of the cells shells are sold en masse to Israel in 1973 for counter battery fire, because they were getting outranged by Soviet artillery and a

number of engagements they had. And these new shells allow them to take the the range advantage back in a number of their conflicts. So the US defense establishment goes very gaga for Bulls Bullets, which had made the US M 107 the most valuable field gun on the face of the earth. Money came pouring in. And the United States was grateful enough that bastards pot alumni Barry Goldwater, the then senator from Arizona pushed forward a bill making Gerald Bull retroactively a US citizen for the last 10 years. Now, that's interesting. Goldwater shows up in such interesting places over and over again. Yeah, that's a real weird one for him to be it. And the reason they give Gerald Bull like 10, basically his citizenship, it counts as if he's been a citizen for 10 years.

It's a security clearance thing. They want to be able to give him a higher security clearance because of the work that he's doing. But there's like requirements about how long you had to be a US citizen. He's one of, I think, three people who have ever had this done. Unless you were a Nazi and then you just get straight lined right in. Well, we don't talk about that so much. That doesn't go up in Congress, you know, it's different. Yeah. The Space Research Corporation was doing pretty well by most people's standards at this point. They've got about $11 million in US defense contracts, which is quite a lot of money at the time. But bowl is still disappointed by their rate of growth. From the Washington Post, quote, in two competitions, his revolutionary 155 millimeter

shell design outshot the US Army's M198 cannon system hands down, according to knowledgeable sources. But the army spurned his system and stuck with its own less powerful guns. So they want his shells, they have things they want him to do for them. But he wants to make really big guns and sell them. And the US Army's like, no, we don't really, we don't want to buy a whole new set of artillery. Like we're happy that you've made the ones we have work a lot better. We know we're not really on board with this shit. And again, he never forgives the United States for not wanting to buy his big, stupid cannons. Now, who keep taking their money, but this like really enrages him. So he works out a deal with a Belgian ammunition manufacturer to create a European

subsidiary of his company funded by an injection of their investment cash. This money allowed Gerald bull to do what he did best design new really fucking big cannons. And his latest invention was the GC gun Canadian 45, a 155 millimeter howitzer that could fire a shell with twice the throw weight of any of the biggest guns used at the time. It outranges all of the existing field artillery in the world by a significant margin. The New York Times writes, quote, a triumph of military engineering, the GC 45 vindicated bulls belief in his own genius. He took his revenge by selling it to the highest bidder. That turned out to be South Africa, then fighting a costly war against Soviet backed Angolan and Cuban forces on the savannahs of Angola

and in desperate need of a new long range artillery weapon. Restricted by the United Nations arms embargo, the South African regime set out to acquire the GC 45 technology illegally. At first, South Africa approached space research corporation to provide 55,000 extended range shells for its existing artillery. The US helped the deal along with the with the when the office of munitions control waived the requirement to obtain an export license for what were termed as rough steel forgings to unidentified gun barrels. The GC 45 test models were shipped out with the shells. So this is very illegal. So what happens is he gets the US to approve him selling them better shells, and he ships out pieces of these GC 45 guns of a prototype to the South Africans

at the same time. And the US is very aware about this, but it's all kept on the down low because you're not allowed to sell South African new military technology because they're using it in brutal colonial wars with a deep racist bent. I have to assume that the US government at that point is eyeballing that security clearance they gave him pretty warily. Oh, no, no, they're on board with this because South Africa is anti-communist. So this is very illegal, but they are they know exactly what's going on. They're helping make this happen. But it's also technically illegal, right? Like it's one of these George Gerald's son, Michael, later would say about his father's understanding of the arrangement that he was, quote, led to believe it was the thing to do that

the US had a passive policy to more or less favor these type of things in order to save the last bastion of capitalism in Africa. So it's very illegal. And no one ever says we're making this legal. They're just like, hey, if you just do this, it's not going to be a problem. Amazing. Yeah, we got you. We got you, buddy. Just like just get the biggest guns possible to the most racist country in the world. It's as many of them as you can ship over. And by God, he does. In 1977, the South African government's arms division, which I think is called arms core, buys a 20 percent stake in the space research corporation, which came with a license to manufacture the GC 45, which they'd already received parts to copy. Soon South Africa was

marketing their gun as the G five, a product of their homegrown arms industry, and absolutely not a violation of international law. So they're like, we made a cannon that's really good. We made it all on our own. We just popped this out of nothing. We just figured this out all on our own, pulled out a little sheet of paper at the local pub and drew on it with some crayons and boom, here we go. Giant cannon. We built a real big gun all on our own, just us. South Africa. I mean, that's our South African ingenuity right there, right? So this works out for a while. Works great for the South Africans, because again, they were being very badly as Israel had been. They were being like horribly outranged by better Soviet

artillery. And once they've got the G five, like, fuck it, like again, it's the best field gun in the world, right? Like nothing really measures up to encounter battery fire. So unfortunately for Bol in 1980, the story about his little cannon caper goes public. The Washington Post writes, quote, when press reports later revealed that the munitions had gone to South Africa, despite a U.S. trade embargo, the customs service began probing SRC. Bol enlisted true dough, who's an American general who had once headed army intelligence, and Richard Bissell, former deputy director of the CIA, to take his case to the highest levels of the Carter administration. Within a few months, Lawrence Curtis, the customs agent who headed the bull probe, found that his ambitious plans

for wide ranging indictments of numerous individuals and firms in three countries for arms export crimes had come unraveled. Bol and one other individual were allowed to plead to reduced charges, a move that resolved the case quickly, but also eliminated any possibility that a trial could produce potentially embarrassing revelations about any involvement of U.S. agencies with Bol's munitions exports. I was totally surprised, very disappointed and bewildered, says Curtis. And Curtis quits not that long after this. Now, the House Subcommittee on Africa subsequently discovers that the state's OMC had been told of the Bol South Africa scheme three years before the shipments were reported publicly and had done nothing. The preponderance of evidence was that

through the CIA introductions, the United States was turning a blind eye, recalls subcommittee chairman Howard Wolpe. The United States government was totally negligent in enforcing American law. So again, this is like the CIA is heavily involved, like they, we absolutely approve of this until it gets discovered. And then it's like this, yeah, you got to fall on your sword a little bit, buddy. But we'll make sure the investigation doesn't get that far and you just get kind of a slap on the wrist, you know, like you're going to have to take one for the team here. But we're not going to let them actually fully investigate your company or what's happened. So that's a great indication. It's such a great example of how these American agencies work, right? Or many,

many government agencies work. The actual supposed will of the country or the law of the country is irrelevant to the agency. And they really run as a rogue state within a state. Yeah. And that's like exactly what happens here. And they try to promise Bull like, Hey, if you just play a ball with this, it's not going to be that bad. And they wind up being a little wrong. So Bull pleads guilty to one count of smuggling 30,000 shells to cannon barrels and a radar van to South Africa without a license. Now you would think that would be a pretty serious crime. I think if I were to smuggle 30,000 high explosive shells to any country, I would probably get in a lot of trouble. That would be my guess. The federal prosecutors recommend no jail time.

Well, it was against the communists, right? Yeah, it was to fight communists. And what's actually, this is a rare case, the judge in this, as I guess kind of rad because he puts Bull away for six months because it's up to him, right? So he is able to like the feds are trying to give Bull no time at all. And this judge is like, Oh, fuck that shit. Like, you have to do some fucking time. Like, I like fuck you, man. And so Bull actually does go to jail for six months, which he's fucking livid. This makes him so angry at the United States at like he's just enraged. And it is like, it's because like, obviously, no sympathy for a man who gets in trouble smuggling arms to the apartheid South African government, right? Like, fuck that,

fuck you. But also, he did get screwed over, right? Like he was just doing what the army and the CIA wanted him to do. It did teach him a hard lesson about how the US government actually functions with its allies. Yeah. And it's one of those things like, you know, we talk about how nice Jimmy Carter's post presidency thing is like the Carter administration does everything they can to get this guy off because they are fine with it. Everyone's fine with it, except for this one judge. So good on you, judge, for doing something. I wonder what happened to that judge. Did he like wake up dead one day? Probably had a bad fishing trip. This was the period in which there were more consequences for making the CIA angry. You know, who else makes the CIA angry?

Nestle. Yeah, they do. The Nestle's intelligence arm does now significantly outrange the CIA. It's it's really they come from behind victory for the Nestle corporation. Our primary sponsor. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his heart is like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that

man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, and we're back. So when we last left off our buddy, Gerald Bull, he's been kind of fucked over. He also totally deserved to do time for smuggling guns to South Africa. But also he's not the one who probably should have gotten the worst penalty for that. Probably a bunch of CIA dudes who should have been punished for that and a bunch of other stuff. So Bull is

very angry and it's just kind of a fucked up situation. True to form, he goes on the war path against his former employer and like spends a lot of time in the media shit talking the United States and like particularly our level of weapons development. He tells a Canadian journalist quote, the US has obsolete conventional weapons and no morale in their armed forces. They couldn't defeat Timbuktu in a fight. And this is not long after the end of the Vietnam War. So he's like he's also not not far off, you know, kind of pouring a little salt into the wound. Yeah. Bull's US and Canadian businesses had gone broke as a result of the whole scandal, but his Belgian operations were still humming along. Now furious at both Canada and the United States, he moved to

Brussels and started making money the only way he knew how by selling really fucking big guns. He designed a new howitzer based off of the GC 45 for Austria and he made a cool five million selling them the plans. Bull told the Austrians, Hey, you guys are going to be making this cannon. You're your arms industry at home. There's not a whole lot of you don't need a whole lot of guns for the Austrian army. You might want to consider selling them. And by the way, I think I know a guy who's in the market for some really big guns. The little dude you might have heard of named Saddam Hussein. Yeah, baby. Our favorite romance novelist is in the game. A story about a man who wanted to build the biggest gun ever would of course involve a rack at some point. It is the 70s.

So his guns, the Austrians start making a shitload of bull's guns and sending them to Jordan who then sells them to it. Well, they're being sold to Iraq, but kind of by way of Jordan so that the Austrians can pretend they're selling to Jordan because you can't really sell guns to Iraq right now because Saddam Hussein was a little bit of an international pariah because he just invaded Iran and started this horrible one of the great bloodbaths of the 20th century. So it's kind of dicey selling guns to Saddam right now. So they have to hide it yet again. Here's the Washington Post quote. According to a still classified Austrian report, Saddam, whose war with Iran had bogged down, met with the Austrian Interior Minister in April 1982 and demanded to know, where are our guns?

Can't you speed up delivery? We require them urgently. Vest alpine was Austria's largest state owned industry. But facing slumping sales and layoffs, it made a risky secret decision to violate neutral Austria's ban on selling weapons to belligerents. And in the next few years, sold bull's cannons not only to Iraq, but also to Iran. Today, the two former Austrian chancellors and various other cabinet ministers have become the subject of the largest criminal investigations in Austrian history. Documents and records in the vest alpine sale of 200 GH in 45s to Iran indicate that the Reagan administration pursuing its tilt towards Iraq and the Iran-Iraq war quietly eased the sale of guns to Iraq, but sought to prevent the Austrians from selling bull's guns

to Iran. Now, this was an unusual piece of moral consistency from the Reagan administration, because they absolutely sell guns to the Iranians, too. They have no problem selling weapons to the Iranians, but they do briefly try to stop bull. What better way to make profit when you sell meat grinders than to also sell the meat? Yeah, exactly. The CIA actually sits down with the Austrian ambassador and shows him CIA satellite photos of these artillery pieces in an Iranian training center. And there are some token efforts made to stop further trade, but Iran gets like 200 of these guns. Bull's business with China was doing gangbusters now, too. So he also starts through the CIA selling guns to China, because the CIA has a vested interest in China having

artillery that can outrange Soviet artillery, because the Chinese and the Soviets are having all sorts of fucking kerfuffles right now, like border kerfuffles. And this is after Nixon goes to China. We're very much tilting towards China, especially as like an anti-Soviet sort of thing. So the CIA is very bullish on the idea of China getting their hands on some of these gigantic fucking bull cannons. And China loves this guy. They invite him to a test range in Manchuria in 1983, and his guides in China showed him that they had collected every academic paper he'd published over the course of his career, going back to the 50s. They told him they wanted his help to aid arms maker Narenko in producing a full line of his 155 millimeter cannons. Now, they

understood that they were dealing with a guy who had a massive ego and they provide him with food, drinks and flattery. He even has his photo taken with Deng Xiaoping and was with Deng Xiaoping and was invited to teach a course at Nanjing University, which he did. So they're very much like, oh, we get what kind of man you are. We will make you as happy as possible because we want very large guns. We would like the biggest guns you can make us, please. Now, there's a little bit of a problem here because in order to sell this technology or at least his knowledge of how to make it to China, there's a munitions control license, right? Like you have to, there's a bunch of things you have to do to sell weapons to China if the weapon technology is of

U.S. origin and bull is a U.S. citizen now. But he's also a Canadian citizen and he gets his friend Trudow, this Army General, former head of intelligence and his CIA buddies to argue that since he's Canadian, the weapons are not of U.S. origin and thus no export license is necessary. And the State Department is like, this is not a very good justification, but the CIA is again like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, let this shit happen. We want to get these guys, the biggest guns we can get them. In 1984, this story broke when a customs agent, acting off of a tip, searched bullet and airport and found a signed $25 million arms contract with China in his suitcase. Maybe don't take that one with you. Well, you couldn't fit the can in your suitcase,

but you can certainly fit the contract. Yeah, just keeping his giant international crime contract in his suitcases. He walks through security. So there's a grand jury investigation and it looks again like bull is about to go away for arms dealing. But again, the CIA steps in and they squash the case, which dies completely. He doesn't even go to trial at this point. Like they just put an end to this because they really want China to get these guns. And in fact, in 1986, the Pentagon actually steps in directly to help China complete their 155 millimeter cannon production line designed by bull. The Washington Post reports, quote, according to a US defense consultant involved in the project, the army issued a US funded foreign military sales contract to a

California firm to provide China with a 155 millimeter artillery fuse manufacturing line. Initially, I was surprised, this consultant said, I thought Narinco only made 130 smaller guns. So why were they building 155 millimeter fuses when they didn't have 155s? Well, the US government knew they were building 155s prior to 1986. Barely a year later, said the consultant in Israeli intelligence sources, Narinco had made its first sale of the so called WAC 21 bull designed guns to Iraq. According to a person associated with bulls work in Iraq, the scientists soon caught the attention of Camille Hussein, an influential cousin and son in law of Saddam with a proposal that bull Narinco and a Spanish firm build a huge 203 millimeter self propelled halitzer for Iraq.

It's fascinating to me that even when he's helping China build these guns, they still keep winding up in Saddam's army. Like, all everything flows to Saddam Hussein in this period. If you're making big guns, they are winding up in Saddam's armory at some point. Saddam's like, yo, dog, I heard about this thing called the Paris gun. I kind of want the Tehran gun. Can you help me with this? I would like to shoot Tehran with a giant cannon from Baghdad, please. And yeah, so bull works with Narinco and a Spanish company and they make this massive 203 millimeter halitzer for the Iraqi military. There's a prototype of this stupidly huge gun called the Al Faw that was produced and shown off at an arm show in Baghdad. And Saddam

is over the moon about this. If you know anything about our man, Saddam, Motherfucker loved his guns, literally got an education by threatening his principle at gunpoint was was a big fan of big guns. And he is enthralled by bull. Finally, bull has found a guy who's like, anything you want to make, man, as long as it's a real big gun, like I'm on board. Can you go play one of these? I kind of want to. Yeah, can you go play one of these fuckers so I can carry it around? So in 1988, Saddam Hussein signs a contract with Gerald Bull to produce more normal artillery. So now Bull is just working directly with the Iraqi government. So he signs this contract to make, you know, more 155s and 203s. But he also in the contract is included something else.

He finally has a contract to make the gun of his dreams. See, Saddam was an ambitious man and he wanted to start his own space program. Now, if you've ever interfaced with any relics of the old Bathurst government or talk to a single Iraqi who lived under that government, the idea that Saddam would have had a successful space program is a fun proposition. I think a lot of things would have burst in reentry. But Bull was confident that his genius was enough to overcome the fact that Saddam Hussein was terrible at running Iraq. From the BBC, quote, the Iraqi government paid Bull $25 million to begin Project Babylon, the first true space gun project on the condition that he continued to work on their artillery. Project Babylon began life as three super guns, two full

sized big Babylon 1000 millimeter caliber guns, and a prototype 350 millimeter gun called baby Babylon. The full size big Babylon barrel would have been 156 meters in length with a one meter bore. In total, it would have weighed 1510 tons, far too big to be transportable. And so instead would have been mounted at a 45 degree angle on a hillside. The absolute biggest gun anyone has ever thought to build. Yeah, like the 156 meter long barrel, 1000 millimeter, like Jesus Christ. It's really hard to wrap your head around that size, honestly, when you think about it, when you really put that into context. It's a gun the skies of a skyscraper, right? It is, yeah. Yeah. Each shot would have used nine tons of especially designed propellant. And using this propellant,

big Babylon would have been theoretically capable of shooting a 600 kilogram projectile across 1000 kilometers of distance, putting Kuwait and Iran well within striking distance from inside of Iraq. Alternatively, the gun could have been used to launch a 2000 kilogram rocket assisted projectile carrying a 200 kilogram satellite. Now, had it been completed, big Babylon probably would have been a really low cost way to launch satellites of a certain size. Right now, NASA estimates it costs about $22,000 per kilogram to put something into orbit. Gerald's gun would have cost about $1,700 per kilogram over and over again. The concept doesn't sound like it seems it makes sense. Yeah. The idea is plausible. Yeah. And like Saddam probably, if he had not

been quite the guy that he was and he had actually had this thing built, he probably could have made good money on it, you know? Like the problem is that the Iraqi government under Saddam was and today there was so much corruption that I don't know how much I think they would have actually been able to like get this going. But they were able to like, like it's not really that much more complicated than sucking oil out of the earth and selling it. So like I think theoretically, this could have been a really significant industry for Iraq. Like if they'd actually built this thing, they could have made a lot of money shooting satellites into space very, very cheaply. They would have literally been, they would have literally been the little guy's satellite launching

platform. Yeah. They could have democratized satellite launch. Yeah. And it's interesting to think if he hadn't done some of the, especially like hadn't done some of the aggressive things that he'd done or and was asked to do in some cases by the CIA, if Iraq had built this thing and started launching cheap satellites and we had gotten to like the 90s and the internet era and there had been fucking Iraq willing to put a satellite into space for goddamn nothing. And for anybody, maybe a really interesting set of changes to like what happens on the internet, like who the fuck knows where that could have gone. I would have had Starlink sooner. Yeah. Starlink sooner. Now, of course, Saddam Hussein was Saddam Hussein and everyone who found

out about the super gun immediately assumed he was going to use it to shoot at people because, and it's the kind of thing maybe he is Saddam Hussein, he does a lot of shooting at people. He's also, it's a bad weapon. Like it's people who will talk about like, was he planning to use this as a weapon? We'll point out like it's one of the worst things you can imagine as a weapon system because planes exist, right? Maybe he could have like shot at Iran with it and Iraq had air, had, you know, at least during points in the war air superiority. But like if he had thought to like fire at Israel or even Kuwait, like you could blow this thing up very easily. It's not, it can't defend itself. It cannot be hidden. It is extremely obvious where it's firing from and it can't really

move. Like it's not a good weapon system. So I kind of, I'm kind of of the opinion that yeah, he might not have wanted it as a weapon. He might have wanted to like shoot shit into space. And that was when people who would like in conversations with other weapons designers, they'd be like, well, are you worried that he's going to use this to like shoot whatever other country? Gerald would be like, well, why it would just be throwing your gun away. It's going to get bombed and it'll be useless then. So, and it is one of those things I should probably talk about what the recoil on this thing would have been because it is not possible to fire without the entire world noticing. The recoil force from shooting this gun once would have totaled 27,000

tons, which is equivalent to a small nuclear blast. Shooting this thing would have been a seismic event detectable in every country on earth. Like it is hard to overstate what a big fucking canon this would have been. But you know, what if it wasn't the cannon itself to be used as a weapon, but what if it was to shoot weapons into space? Yeah, I mean, that, that's, that is the thing. And that's actually what one of the, one, one of Saddam Hussein's members of government argues that that was the purpose. It wasn't meant to be used as like field artillery. So what like, what years are we talking right now? This is 80. Yeah, this is like the 87, 88. I mean, we're talking the Star Wars era. Yeah, yeah. So it makes sense. Yeah. And in general, Hussein Kamal Al-Majid, a former

head of Iraq's weapons development program, later said, quote, it was meant for a long, for long range attack and also to blind spy satellites. Our scientists were seriously working on that. It was designed to explode a shell in space that would have sprayed a sticky material on the satellite and blinded it. And that, that does seem like maybe more plausible. It's a glue gun from catch 22. He's made a big glue gun. He's made like one of those. They're going to shoot the German shells up. They glue all the P 17s together and they fall to earth. Just Saddam Hussein, like drunk at one in the morning watching a Spider-Man cartoon and go getting on the form. I have an idea. Or he read catch 22 and he's like, this is a good idea. Yeah. We can just glue

the satellites together and they'll fall to the earth. It's very funny. I don't know how much I believe what Hussein Kamal Al-Majid is saying because he's one of a number of guys who defects from Saddam's government to Jordan to work with the UN. And like some of those guys were telling truth about some, but they were also all liars who had been part of like the Bathas administration and been fine with Saddam until they pissed him off and thought that they were going to get killed, at which point they fled and, you know, turned on him in order to get a better deal themselves. Like none of them are trustworthy people is what I will say about all of these. There's a number of these generals who like defect. Some of like the bullshit we get during the second invasion

of Iraq is because these guys who defect from the Iraqi government and make these very lurid claims about Iraqi weapons systems that are not true. I'm not convinced Saddam actually wanted to use this as a weapon at all. He's not a dumb guy. He does make some dumb calls, but I think that like he's probably thinking like, we could make a fuckload of money with this thing. He might have legitimately just wanted to be part of the space race, right? Yeah. I mean, seriously, yeah. It would have been cool. Yeah. He was that kind of dude. I kind of think he might have not had

violent intent with this thing. He might have just wanted to make a shitload of money. Who knows? In May of 1989, baby Babylon, a 45 meter long prototype was finished, finished and mounted on a hillside. Meanwhile, parts for the big guns started being made in Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy. Once again, this was all extremely illegal. You're not allowed to sell Saddam like new weapons systems. You are certainly not allowed to build him a cannon that could shoot space. That is very against the law. So they're hiding all of this as like industrial equipment for like reservoirs and shit. Like, oh, we need these big tubes for some like civil engineering projects so we can have them made

in the UK. The British don't know these tubes are meaning to be a fucking gun barrel. Although, of course, they do know because none of this, they don't keep this a secret very well. So this gun gets under construction like five different countries and it's actually coming together. Gerald Bowles, the dream of his entire life of decades, he has the backing, he has the place to do it, he has the technology, he is going to make his super gun. But his good luck doesn't last, Carl, because on March 22, 1990, Gerald Bowles suffered a significant setback. He was shot three times in the back of the head with a silenced pistol outside of his apartment in Brussels. That tends to put a hitch in your place.

Yeah, that's really going to, that'll really interrupt your weapon design goals. Very few gun designers have continued to work after being shot three times in the back of the head with a silenced pistol. I got to say, the minute you told me that, the first thing that popped in my head, and I don't know the story, so I'm curious to where this is going to go. But the minute I heard that, I thought, Mossad. That's what everyone thinks, right? That is the number one assumed culprit. There are no witnesses, obviously, right? Which also makes you think, Mossad, because they're pretty good at killing people. No one has ever been charged with his murder. Whatever kind of suppressor they were using on the gun was good enough that nobody even hears

this. They find him later. You know what's interesting about that is the Mossad was known for using suppressed.22s. That is a pretty good chance. Yeah. That does line up. I have not found direct information on what caliber he was shot with, but I would not be surprised. That said, there are some other possibilities. When police arrive at the scene, they find his key in the door and a brief case with $20,000 in cash. So everyone knows immediately, like, this is not a robbery, right? And it may even be that, like, they made sure to leave cash on him to let people know, like, this is as a message to other people, like, this was not a robbery. He was making this kind of shit for Saddam, and that's not okay. If you don't want to get shot in the back of the head,

don't make fucking guns for Saddam Hussein. Would not be surprised that if it is the Mossad, that would be very within kind of the Mossad's operating principles. Now, and it's interesting because the people who suspect a Mossad, the most reasonable expectation is not because he was building them a super gun, but because he was also working to improve Iraqi ballistic missiles. Like, they were worried about the Scuds, basically. They didn't care about this. They recognized, too, the big cannon is not a great weapon system. They're worried that he's going to make the Scuds more accurate, and he's, Saddam's gonna, you know, shell Tel Aviv again or whatever. But really, it's also worth noting, the Mossad is the, what most people assume,

it could have been literally anyone. The CIA has a ton of reasons to want this guy dead, right? So does UK intelligence. He's building his gun in the UK. South African intelligence has a lot of reason to want this guy dead at this point. Two weeks after his death, UK customs seized parts of the super gun before they could leave port. So there's even an argument to be made that, like, maybe this is a British operation, right? They find out what he's doing, that he's doing it with, like, their manufacturers. They kill him and they seize his gun. And yeah, who knows? We have no idea who killed him. Mossad is probably, like, the smart money, but he really, he had pissed off basically everyone with the capacity to carry off a hit. So it could have been, might

have been fucking Iraq. Maybe he had some sort of falling out with Saddam, you know? They had an argument over the dinny-table one night, and that was the end of that. Yeah. He was definitely, you got to say one thing about Gerald Bol. He gave a lot of people reasons to want him dead. It's like, I'm trying to understand the moral of the story. Is it, is it, is the moral of the story you should not necessarily be a, a moral arms dealer and weapons designer, or is the moral of the story follow your dreams and you'll get shit in the back of the head three times with a suppressed 22? I'm not sure which. Both of them are morals. Probably the wisest thing if you have

a dream is to maybe, even if you have a beautiful dream, you should not follow that dream to the point that leads you to make artillery for apartheid South Africa and a space gun for Saddam Hussein. Yeah. Maybe at that point you should have a moment of self-revelation. You know what? Maybe I'm the baddie. When you keep sitting down in meetings with Saddam Hussein, you should probably think, and Donna Rumsfeld should have come to this conclusion too. I might be making some bad steps here. Yeah. These are some odd life choices. How did I get here today? I don't feel good about consistently being in a room with this dude. And yeah, shortly after Gerald's assassination, Iraq invades Kuwait and the dream of the super gun dies, at least for now. You know?

We have the plans. We have the technology. We could build the biggest gun anyone has ever built and use it to shoot satellites or goo into space. I like the goo idea. I like the goo idea. I think goo in space has been a completely unexplored reality. I think we as Americans need something to bind us together again. And maybe we could build, I don't know, the Mount Rainier. We build a big gun onto the side of Mount Rainier and we use it to shoot the fucking moon. Well, I would think if we were going to do it in true American style, we would do it like Mount Rushmore. We would take something that was on a reservation and destroy an indigenous location, a holy mountain of sorts. Yeah, because that recoil is going to destroy everything sacred around it. So if you want to

do it right, we have to do it someplace that's on indigenous land. And that would be the truly American way. We could call it colonialism, the gun. Yeah. And then we can use it to shoot settlers onto Mars, which we then fuck up. That's true. You know, one life goal, I guess, is to live long enough to be around, to experience or learn about the first gunfight on Mars. This would get us there sooner. Yeah, we could shoot people and guns onto Mars with our big gun that we built to shoot things into Mars. All things come back to guns and giant phallic symbols, don't they? Yeah, it is a pretty... It is definitely not surprising that Saddam hears about this man's dream and says, I will absolutely build that big, stupid gun in my country. You

can put it anywhere. I want the biggest, longest, largest thing to shoot goo with ever made. Yeah, I want a big, long gun to shoot goo into space. It is kind of like the fundamental desire of every dictator. I want you to build me a big penis with a 27,000 ton recoil that can shoot goo all over my enemy's satellites, which are basically their eyes, you know? Saddam just wanted to give a facial to all of the countries that had angered him. We just came to the true conclusion. It was the Iraqi space book hockey gun. Yeah, the Iraqi space book hockey cannon. Oh, fucking hell. All right, Carl. Well, that is the episode. That's what I got for you. This was a real treat. I have to... I mean, I had heard about space cannons before, but I did not know all of these stories.

And I mean, I had also been obviously very familiar with Maxim's work, but not Maxim himself. And the parallels between this are quite interesting, really. Yeah. When you think about people that are so driven by their goal that they lose the morality in the process. Yeah. And it is one of those things when you talk about the inevitability of such things. Yeah. When you have people that are that dedicated, like no one was ever the only way to stop Gerald Bol from making bigger and bigger guns was to shoot him three times in the back of the head. Like he wasn't... He was so driven to keep making those things, which is fascinating. And it is one of those, like, yeah. It also brings you back to that thought. I mean,

those thought experiments that never actually truly be explored besides just thinking about them because we don't know what the reality would be. But what if he had been given the opportunity to make his space gun without turning into this international arms designer and dealer? Like, you know, if Canada said, you know what? Go for it. Make that big thing. We want to launch goo into space. And he had just gone down that path. Yeah. Perhaps. I mean, it could have changed everything. What if Hitler had sold his paintings, right? I mean, who the fuck knows? It could have changed the world. Yeah. I mean, I think the main thing that would have, if he built his big space gun in Canada, motherfucker would probably be a billionaire because it seems like it would

have worked and it would have been that like, that's just an insane amount of money. If you can make it that much cheaper to put satellites in space. Not only that, but what would the butterfly effect be for the technology of what we could now launch into space at low cost? I mean, that could have changed things in a very humanitarian way. Yeah. It is really interesting to like think about. And again, I am kind of from an alternative science fiction standpoint fascinated the possibility of like, you have the internet boom and Iraq is letting anybody with two grand put a tiny satellite into space. What does that do? Like, how is that different? How was like piracy different? If the pirate bay could just like launch satellites into space for a few

grand apiece and like, what does that change about like the late 90s, early 2000s and all of these, like it is kind of a fascinating question to think about. It could have been pretty weird. Or Saddam would have done something shady. Who knows? I would like to think it would have done something amazing. It would have brought great technology to the world. But in reality, we probably would have landed up with four Chan in space. Yeah. Cause it again, it is Saddam Hussein. So you shouldn't expect things to go too well. Right. Yeah. He is the guy that he is. He probably, he may have just sold it all to the Disney corporation in order to shut down any ability to broadcast non-Disney products. We could live in a global dictatorship of Disney enforced by

Saddam's space penis. Well, we're kind of close to that already. There's just different mechanisms. Look, again, it trends and forces, right? Like even without the space gun, Disney found a way. Life finds a way. Yeah. Corporate oligarchy finds a way. With or without a gun to shoot goo into space with. I do want to see that fucking thing fire. Nine tons of propellant. Like. I want, I mean, honestly, legitimately, just firing that thing, how much like damage in the surrounding environment would happen from the concussion is hard to fathom. You would have to keep every possible living thing away from it, right? I mean, you would have to have like a couple of miles clear. Because it's just too fucking, you can't be near that thing. It's not

like hearing protection doesn't even matter at that point. It'll fucking liquify you. This will make when the mythbusters destroyed a bunch of windows firing one of their little things in one of their filming episodes seem very minor by comparison. Yeah, it is, it is a very, it's, it's, yeah. Could have made a pretty good water slide too. All right, Carl, that's our episode. You got any pluggables to plug? I am my normal pluggable. I run in range.TV. You can find me on multiple different distribution points. One of my big things that I did long ago is demonetize my work because I believe it's completely viewer supported. Therefore, no sponsors and no overlords and got a lot of hype

once when I decided to publish my content on porn hub. So at any rate, if you want to see gun content that's a little bit outside of the norm, you can find me at in range.TV. Excellent. Well, check that out. Yeah. So my book is now available for pre-order after the revolution, my novel. You can pre-order it with an autographed book plate in the front of the book right now at akpress.org slash after the revolution with a dash or if you just google akpress after the revolution, you'll find it. That's the easy way to do it. Just google after the revolution, akpress pre-order my book. It'll come signed. So that's pretty cool. And yeah, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards for today. Sophie?

You're not going to play the live stream? Absolutely not. Okay. I'm not doing it either. I do it every episode. I don't. All right, we're done. Nailed it. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained

astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.