The "Supergun" affair was a 1990 political scandal in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

that involved two businesses, Sheffield Forgemasters and Walter Somers,

Gerald Bull Gerald Vincent Bull (March 9, 1928 – March 22, 1990) was a Canadian engineer who developed long-range artillery. He moved from project to project in his quest to economically launch a satellite using a space gun, huge artillery piece, to which ...

, members of parliament Hal Miller and Nicholas Ridley, the UK's

Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (MI numbers, Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of Human i ...

, a failed prosecution and components of a "supergun" (as newspaper headlines had it) that the businesses were alleged to have been exporting to Iraq that they and others had contacted the government about in 1988. The collapse of the court case preceded the

Arms-to-Iraq The Arms-to-Iraq affair concerned the uncovering of the government-endorsed sale of arms by United Kingdom, British companies to Ba'athist Iraq, Iraq, then under the rule of Saddam Hussein. The scandal contributed to the growing dissatisfaction w ...

case, that involved a different company Matrix Churchill, by four months. Canadian engineer

became interested in the possibility of using 'superguns' in place of rockets to insert payloads into orbit. He lobbied for the start of

Project HARP Project HARP, for high altitude research project, was a joint venture of the United States Department of Defense and Canada's Department of National Defence created with the goal of studying ballistics of re-entry vehicles and collecting uppe ...

to investigate this concept in the 1960s, using paired ex-US Navy

16"/50 caliber Mark 7 gun The 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 – United States Naval Gun is the main armament of the ''Iowa''-class battleships and was the planned main armament of the canceled . Description Due to a lack of communication during design in 1938, the Bureau of ...

barrels welded end-to-end. Three of these 16"/100 (406 mm) guns were emplaced, one in

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

, Canada, another in

Barbados Barbados, officially the Republic of Barbados, is an island country in the Atlantic Ocean. It is part of the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies and the easternmost island of the Caribbean region. It lies on the boundary of the South American ...

, and the third near

Yuma, Arizona Yuma is a city in and the county seat of Yuma County, Arizona, United States. The city's population was 95,548 at the 2020 census, up from the 2010 census population of 93,064. Yuma is the principal city of the Yuma, Arizona, Metropolitan ...

. HARP was later cancelled, and Bull turned to military designs, eventually developing the

GC-45 howitzer The GC-45 (''Gun, Canada, 45-Caliber (artillery), calibre'') is a 155 mm howitzer designed by Gerald Bull's Space Research Corporation (SRC) in the 1970s. Versions were produced by a number of companies during the 1980s, notably in Austria a ...

. Some years later, Bull interested

Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein (28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 until Saddam Hussein statue destruction, his overthrow in 2003 during the 2003 invasion of Ira ...

in funding Project Babylon. The objective of this project is not certain, but one possibility is that it was intended to develop a gun capable of firing an object into

orbit In celestial mechanics, an orbit (also known as orbital revolution) is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an ...

, whence it could then drop onto any place on the Earth. Gerald Bull was assassinated in March 1990, terminating development and the parts were confiscated by British customs after the

Gulf War , combatant2 = , commander1 = , commander2 = , strength1 = Over 950,000 soldiers3,113 tanks1,800 aircraft2,200 artillery systems , page = https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-PEMD-96- ...

References

Further reading