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00:00Next on Secrets of War, from Germany's Big Bertha and World War One to Iraq's top secret
00:08Project Babylon, they are the ultimate projection of force. Secret cannons designed to strike
00:15their target from miles away. Handheld rifles that pack the power of the atom and superguns
00:21capable of launching satellites into space. Superguns is next on Secrets of War.
00:30Secrets of War
01:00Secrets of War
01:30It has been said that national boundaries are drawn in one of two ways, with pens or
01:49with guns. Unfortunately, the 20th century saw more of the latter, as warring nations
01:55used guns as their principal means to protect power. In secret laboratories and on military
02:03proving grounds, the world over, engineers have sought to make these guns more powerful,
02:08more accurate and more deadly. Of all weapons in the artillery arsenal, perhaps none is more
02:16awe-inspiring than the big gun. These are the super cannons on the field of war, shooting
02:28and farther and farther, forever changing the course of battle and history.
02:36The story of superguns dates back more than 500 years when cannons first appeared on the battle.
02:44It must have made a tremendous impression the first time people who were used to bows and arrows found
02:51themselves being attacked by projectiles that didn't need muscle power to throw them, but were thrown by this new chemical device, which was gunpowder.
03:00As cannons grew larger and more accurate, improvements in gunpowder increased their range, but the mechanics of artillery remained virtually unchanged for more than 500 years.
03:15The standard guns of the American Civil War were loaded, aimed and fired much the same as were its ancestors in the 14th century.
03:28As the 19th century came to a close, however, artillery changed dramatically.
03:35The two key events of the 19th century, as far as artillery is concerned, one is breech-loading, the other is rifling.
03:44Small grooves in the inside of a gun's barrel, called rifling, caused artillery rounds to rotate, improving their range and accuracy.
03:54Rifling also allowed for heavier, more streamlined shells.
03:58Breach loading made refiring quicker, and recoil systems allowed a gun to be fired without repositioning and re-aiming after every shot.
04:10The First World War saw modern large caliber, breech-loading artillery wreak destruction on a scale unimaginable in previous conflicts.
04:22The First World War was the Great Artillery War.
04:26The First World War was the Great Artillery War.
04:29It was a huge conflict, a struggle between two sides who had all of the technology of both their societies ranged behind them.
04:40In the volatile political climate in Europe at the end of the 19th century, Belgium recognized its vulnerability and built a series of forts designed to withstand the most powerful field artillery of the day.
04:55Behind these forts, the small country was convinced of its security.
05:02The Belgians had no idea Germany was building a supergun beyond what anyone thought possible.
05:11Big Bertha took its name from Baroness Bertha Krupp, the granddaughter of Alfred Krupp, the German gunmaker.
05:20Originally designed as a coastal gun, the 42-centimeter howitzer weighed in excess of 40 tons.
05:28It was so immense that it had to be transported in pieces and assembled on site.
05:34In August of 1914, the Germans transported their supergun to the outskirts of the Belgian town of Liege, where 12 state-of-the-art forts guarded the border.
05:47Although nobody ever talks about the Kaiser's secret weapon, those 42-centimeter howitzers certainly were a secret weapon.
05:56And the fact that the Germans not only had two guns, but deployed them with a field army, guns of that size, was astonishing.
06:05The thing about the 42-centimeter howitzer is that it fired a shell, which is equivalent in weight to a small car, to a range of between six and seven miles, at high angle, so that at the peak of its trajectory, the shell had the added assistance of the force of gravity.
06:25And if you can imagine the impact of that upon a brick building, it would probably pulverize it into small little bits of dust.
06:36The Belgian forts were no match for the German supergun.
06:40Within three days, those that hadn't been destroyed were surrendered.
06:44The Big Bertha was a very effective weapon in smashing forts, and it shocked everyone on the Allied side because these forts were considered artillery proof.
06:58From Liège, the massive guns moved through Belgium and into France with the same devastating effect.
07:06Five Big Bertha's were eventually built and continued to rain destruction down on the Allies until the end of 1917, when their limited range made them targets for Allied counter-battery attacks.
07:18Still, the Germans had another supergun in the works, and it would change everybody's idea of the limits of artillery.
07:30At 7.18 on the morning of the 23rd of March 1918, the peace in Paris was shattered by an explosion.
07:42The citizens thought it was an air raid, but no airplanes had been seen or heard.
07:51By the end of the day, there were 22 such explosions.
07:55Fifteen people lay dead. Another 36 were wounded.
07:58Only when shell fragments were found and analyzed did French officials realize that airplanes were not responsible for the destruction.
08:08Paris had been the victim of a terrifying new weapon.
08:13A long-range supergun.
08:17It's understandable that this conclusion wasn't arrived at sooner.
08:20The best land artillery of the day had a range of about 23 miles, and the front was nearly 80 miles away.
08:28More than three years earlier, the German advance had stalled and the war ground to a bloody stalemate.
08:35The opposing armies dug in, casualties mounted.
08:39The German military commanders wanted to strike at the heart and soul of the enemy, not just their men at the front.
08:44Aerial bombing of Paris had proved costly and ineffective.
08:50In the autumn of 1916, the dilemma was taken to Krupp, the same company that made Big Bertha.
08:56In an amazing feat of engineering, a revolutionary long-range gun was made suitable for testing by the spring of the following year.
09:04The Kaiser Wilhelm Geschutz, known as the Paris gun, was fashioned by inserting a 21-centimeter liner into a 38-centimeter naval gun.
09:15Under this, a smooth board extension was added.
09:19The resulting barrel was some 34 meters long and weighed in excess of 140 tons.
09:27The gun was so long that a superstructure had to be erected to keep it from drooping.
09:32In the quiet woods near the small French town of Crepy, the Germans built this gun emplacement, the remains of which are still visible today.
09:43An immense amount of pressure was needed to propel the shells 76 miles south to Paris.
09:49Now that powder was so hot and the pressure was so high that every time the gun fired, it wore away because the flame temperature of the cartridge was hotter than the melting point of the steel.
10:04So each shell gradually increased in size and each shell was numbered.
10:10Deterioration of the barrels was so severe they had to be replaced each month.
10:16The Allies tried desperately to silence the big guns.
10:23Railroad artillery was brought closer to attempt counter fire and air raids were called in, but to no avail.
10:30The guns were well camouflaged and moved periodically between concrete emplacements that held them.
10:39And the other interesting question is, if you're firing at a target 76 miles away, deep in enemy country, how do you know if you've hit it?
10:53And that was what was worrying the Allies.
10:56After the war, it was discovered that German spies in Paris were relaying details on where each of the shells landed through operatives in Switzerland and back to Germany.
11:11With this information, the gun crews could adjust their fire.
11:15From March to August of 1918, the super guns fired some 350 shells into Paris, killing 256 citizens and wounding over 600 more.
11:30After the war, the Allies rushed to the woods of Crepe to retrieve the German super gun.
11:38One of the great secrets of World War I was just exactly what happened to the Paris Gachettes.
11:42When the French got in there, it was gone.
11:45The German government treated it as a state secret for well after the war and actually locked up some of their citizens up for, technicians up for releasing anything about it in 1926.
11:58The world may never know what became of the guns.
12:01All that remains are these concrete emplacements, mute witnesses to their mysterious disappearance.
12:06But 70 years later, the Paris guns would inspire the design of the greatest super gun of the century.
12:21The destruction wrought by big guns in the First World War echoed throughout the Second.
12:25Once again, both sides deployed large caliber artillery in the form of naval weapons, coastal guns and railroad guns.
12:36But none could compare that the massive weapons secretly developed by the Krupp factory for the Third Reich.
12:41As an infantryman in the First World War, Adolf Hitler had observed the destructive capability of big guns firsthand.
12:55He was a firm believer in the power of artillery.
12:59Shortly after he was elected chancellor, he asked the Krupp company for a super weapon to penetrate the Maginot Line, France's deeply entrenched, heavily fortified first line of defense.
13:13At more than 1,300 tons, Gustav remains the heaviest gun ever made.
13:19Two trains were required to move the massive weapon in pieces.
13:25When it arrived on site, four specially designed railroad tracks had to be laid to accommodate the gun and the train needed to assemble it.
13:36While this was going on, two anti-aircraft trains were parked to protect it.
13:41A company of infantry were dispersed to protect it.
13:45It needed 1,250 men to man these trains, put the gun together and everything else.
13:53They took three weeks doing it.
13:56Gustav could fire either a 4.7 ton high explosive shell to a range of 29 miles,
14:03or a specially designed 7 ton concrete piercing shell 24 miles.
14:09But the engineering of such a colossal weapon system was more difficult than Krupp estimated,
14:17and Gustav was not completed for Hitler's push into France.
14:22It didn't see action until the siege of Sevastopol in Russia in 1942.
14:27And the most spectacular one was when the anti-concrete shell went straight down into an underground magazine,
14:40naval ammunition magazine outside Sevastopol, and blew the thing sky high in one shot.
14:46After Sevastopol, Gustav was sent to Leningrad, but arrived too late to take part in the siege.
14:51There is little evidence that it ever saw action again.
15:00If you come right down to it, to spend millions of marks on a 1,300 ton cannon,
15:09which in the course of a five-year war, fired 25 shots,
15:15you're not really looking at something that you call cost-effective, are you?
15:21Gustav, like the Paris gun before it, mysteriously disappeared.
15:26Parts were reportedly found in Russia and at the Krupp factory proving grounds.
15:30But after the war, all that remained was a spare barrel and some ammunition.
15:39By the fall of 1943, Germany occupied all of Western Europe.
15:46Only England stood between Hitler and total domination of the continent.
15:51Less than a hundred miles from the coast of France,
15:54London was a tempting but unreachable target for conventional artillery,
15:58and therefore the driving force behind the development of another German secret weapon.
16:04The high-pressure pump gun was a gun that had firing chambers on both sides of the main barrel.
16:14And the idea was that you started the round down the barrel,
16:18and as the round would clear each one of these chambers on the side, it would fire,
16:25adding more and more gas pressure behind the round,
16:29thereby kicking the round out to very, very, very long ranges.
16:36The V3, also known as the Busy Lizzy or the Millipede, was designed as a terror weapon.
16:41Nearly 500 feet long, the guns couldn't be moved or aimed.
16:46They had just one target, London.
16:50In September of 1943, construction was begun in secret on a massive gun installation,
16:56deep in a mountainside near Mimiacs, France.
16:59We are here in the railway tunnel that extends 600 meters.
17:10Inside this tunnel you have an underground railway that measures 300 meters
17:16and was accessible by 11 galleries, each one 100 meters long.
17:21At the end of these galleries there is a parallel tunnel 300 meters long.
17:25And on the other side of this tunnel, where five of these galleries meet,
17:31there are five launching sites inclined at 50 degrees.
17:36The cannons were 127 meters long, pointed in the direction of London.
17:46The shells for the V3 were small by heavy artillery standards.
17:51Still, each gun had an expected rate of fire of up to four rounds an hour.
17:58In all, the guns at the site could have hit London thousands of times a day.
18:07When secret aerial reconnaissance photographs showed trainloads of material
18:12disappearing into a mountain near Mimiacs, the Allies became suspicious.
18:16Without knowing the exact nature of the project, they initiated a massive bombing campaign on the site.
18:24The elder brother of the future U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy Jr., participated in the raids.
18:31He flew one of the planes packed with ten and a half tons of explosives bound for the site near Mimiacs.
18:37He and his co-pilot's mission was to fly the plane at a certain altitude, jump out with parachutes, and have the plane continue on autopilot to fly to its destination, where it would then destroy the structure.
18:55The plane, however, for reasons unknown, then blew up in the air.
19:02Many people suggest this was caused by a short circuit in the plane.
19:10Ironically, by the time this attack took place on the 12th of August 1944, the structure had already been destroyed by an earlier bombing raid.
19:18The Allies were not aware that the first mission had been successful.
19:24Left intact, the V-3 could have been one of the most devastating weapons of the war.
19:32If it had worked, London would have been in ruins.
19:35Can you imagine 200, 150-pound, 180-pound shells dropping on London every hour, day and night?
19:48The place would have been devastated.
19:51Thank God it didn't work.
19:54Germany wasn't the only country engineering giant cannons.
19:59The United States built a Superdun of its own.
20:01Little David was a 914-millimeter mortar designed for Operation Olympic, the top-secret plan for the invasion of Japan.
20:13The Americans felt that an extremely heavy mortar would be necessary to root out deeply entrenched Japanese positions.
20:24It took two tractors to tow the huge gun into position.
20:27One hauled the barrel, the other the steel mounting box.
20:32A hole was dug in the ground and the mounting was inserted with earth packed around it.
20:38Then a crane lowered the massive barrel into place.
20:42Like the guns of a bygone era, Little David was a muzzleloader.
20:47Once the massive round was inserted, the barrel had to be raised to seat it in place.
20:53And off went this 3,700-pound bomb with, I think, about three-quarters of a tonne of explosive inside it, to a range of about 10,000 yards, something like this.
21:13Now, can you imagine three-quarters of a tonne of explosive landing on top of a pillbox or a bunker or something like that?
21:21You would just remove it.
21:24Operation Olympic was set for November of 1945, but before Little David could prove itself in battle, the war with Japan came to an abrupt end.
21:33Atomic bombs would dramatically influence the design of the next generation of superguns.
21:46For all intents and purposes, the close of the Second World War marked the end of the supergun.
21:51The advances of long-range heavy aircraft rendered massive superguns obsolete.
22:05Still, the advent of atomic warheads suggested a new use for heavy artillery.
22:11First proposed in 1944, plans for an atomic cannon were abandoned when the war ended.
22:17But as the Cold War heated up, a weapon was needed to combat the massive numbers of tanks being produced by the Soviet Union.
22:26These mechanized forces threatened to overrun Europe.
22:31Had they been deployed, they may have faced the 280-millimeter howitzer known as Atomic Annie.
22:39Commissioned into service in the mid-1950s, Atomic Annie could lob its nuclear charge up to 18 miles.
22:47A specially-built tractor with twin cabs gave the 75-ton gun surprisingly good mobility.
22:55But when they deployed this thing on exercises in Germany, it never got a chance for the tires to cool down before the enemy air were over it.
23:07And there was the great drawback.
23:11You can't deploy an old-fashioned, it has to be admitted, it is an old-fashioned cannon, of large size against an enemy who has tactical air, short-range missiles, aerial photography.
23:26You can't feel it. It's impossible.
23:30As an early weapon, it was a very effective weapon, but rapidly was overcome by technology because the round was shrunk so that you could put an atomic warhead into an 8-inch gun round or a 155 round.
23:43July 1962, these troops, forming a special task force, were the first in our Army's history to engage in a tactical exercise supported by live nuclear firepower.
23:56This once top-secret U.S. Department of Energy film, declassified in late 1997, shows maneuvers featuring the Davy Crockett.
24:0911 inches in diameter and just 51 pounds, the warhead was the smallest, lightest nuclear weapon ever deployed by the United States.
24:23With a range of up to 2 1⁄2 miles and an explosive punch the equivalent of about 10 tons of dynamite, Davy Crockett was a potent secret weapon to confront the Soviet tanks.
24:35Then Attorney General Robert Kennedy was on hand to observe what would be the last atmospheric detonation of a nuclear weapon to take place at this Nevada test site.
24:48The Davy Crockett is probably the worst weapon system ever devised.
24:52I can only think of one thing worse, and that would probably be an atomic hand grenade.
24:56You had to point the weapon, you had to dig a hole, you fired the weapon, you jumped in the hole.
25:01Because you were in the blast radius of the atomic warhead.
25:06This is not a good idea.
25:09More than 2,000 of the weapons were produced between 1956 and 1963.
25:15With the power of the atom in the hands of a soldier, Davy Crockett was the ultimate super gun.
25:20But there was still one man who thought the greatest gun was yet to be built.
25:28And one day he would build the most colossal super gun of them all.
25:35Born in Ontario, Canada in 1928, Gerald Vincent Bull was one of the century's greatest artillery designers.
25:42After the death of his mother, he was raised by an aunt who encouraged him in his studies at school.
25:49Young Gerald went on to become a brilliant student.
25:52He always saw math as his area, and went to the University of Toronto, and again just excelled and excelled and excelled,
26:00and in fact graduated with a PhD at the age of 23, the youngest PhD that Canada had ever produced.
26:06By the time he was 31, Gerald Bull had already designed a powerful gun that shot small rocket models as an alternative to expensive wind tunnel testing.
26:23On the 4th of October, 1957, the Soviets launched their first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit.
26:31The Russian satellite would have a profound effect on Bull.
26:33He wanted to launch a satellite for Canada.
26:37There was no way the Canadians could come up with the money to launch a satellite using rocketry.
26:43He felt that it would be possible to launch one with a gun, with a huge super gun.
26:50In 1962, Dr. Bull was given an opportunity to test his super gun idea.
26:55As a professor at McGill University in Montreal, he secured American military support for a joint U.S.-Canadian feasibility study named HARP for High Altitude Research Program.
27:08On the island of Barbados and in the desert sands of Arizona, Bull began to push the limits of artillery.
27:18He was soon firing light projectiles up to 45 miles from small 5-inch guns.
27:24Harp's 7-inch guns fired up to 62 miles.
27:29Bull then focused his attention on a super gun.
27:35The Harp gun was initially fashioned by welding together two 16-inch battleship guns.
27:41More than 100 feet long, it was the biggest gun in the world.
27:45Although it was capable of firing a 3,000-pound shell, lightweight projectiles called martlets were the space vehicles Dr. Bull had in mind.
27:59He employed an ingenious method to house the small 8-inch-wide martlets inside the gun barrel.
28:05The gap between the martlets and the barrel wall was filled in by wooden sabos that encapsulated the projectile in a shape similar to an artillery shell.
28:16Both the martlet and the sabos were protected by a base plate.
28:21When the gun was fired, the wood and the base plate fell off, freeing the projectile.
28:26Tail fins stabilized and prolonged the martlet's flight.
28:29I remember as a child going there and having a lot of fun.
28:35You just see it fire and you just stay quiet.
28:38It takes you by shock even though you hear the countdown and you say 3, 2, 1, you're expected.
28:45And then you see the flash. It just takes you by surprise.
28:48And then a few seconds later you hear the bang and that's a second shock for you.
28:53On the 19th of November, 1966, Bull's Arizona gun fired a 185-pound martlet, 112 miles high.
29:07U.S. Director of Project Harp Charles Murphy supervised the firing.
29:10The record of 112 miles is a Guinness Book record which is still standing.
29:17It's the highest a gun has ever fired.
29:19Although the flight of the 16-inch gun was 112 miles straight up in the air,
29:24if we had wanted to try for a horizontal range record and brought it down to an elevation of about 50 degrees,
29:32the range that would have been achieved would have been 250 miles.
29:35The 16-inch Harp gun was to be the launch pad for a small three-stage rocket to boost the 20-pound payload into space.
29:46But before it could be developed, the Canadian and U.S. governments in 1967 terminated Harp funding.
29:53Dr. Bull was initially devastated.
29:59Despite the setback though, he was more convinced than ever that guns could launch payloads into space at a fraction of the cost of large rockets.
30:08He would eventually find a well-heeled sponsor who would finance his dream, a Middle Eastern dictator named Saddam Hussein.
30:16In 1967, Dr. Gerald Bull retreated to his private compound on the border of Quebec and Vermont.
30:28He also quietly entered the arms business as a means to continue his research on super guns.
30:34The man who had fired his super gun higher than anyone else began to tinker with conventional artillery pieces.
30:40Instead of altering the guns, Bull simply redesigned the ammunition they fired.
30:46If you picture a shell, it seems wonderfully streamlined at the front, but of course it's flat at the back.
30:53And the turbulence is a partial vacuum at the back end of a shell.
30:58And the sucking of air inevitably slows down the shell and limits its ultimate range.
31:03Gerald Bull had a great idea of actually designing a system by which you would bleed gas into the space at the back of the shell.
31:12So that it was no longer being, as it were, sucked back by this eternal semi-vacuum void that formed at the end.
31:20Dr. Bull applied some of the project Harp advances to a conventional 155mm shell.
31:26He made it thinner and more streamlined.
31:31He then added small fins as stabilizers to keep the slender shell steady inside the gun.
31:37They also helped the shells to glide farther.
31:43The new GC-45 shell was nothing short of revolutionary.
31:47By lengthening the 155mm gun barrel slightly, the shells were soon capable of flying one and a half times farther than conventional NATO shells.
32:01When you've increased the range of the gun, the benefit is this.
32:06You can put your own guns back where they're safer, or you can fire deeper into enemy territory.
32:12And because one gun can command more ground, you can fire and cover the area with less number of guns.
32:23Before long, artillery guns based on Bull's designs appeared all over the world.
32:29The Israelis used them to protect the Golan Heights.
32:32During the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis bought over 500 artillery cannons based on Bull's design,
32:38and they were used to devastating effect.
32:43In 1984, Bull teamed with Dr. Charles Murphy to publish a book about super guns.
32:49During his research, he became obsessed with the long-range Paris gun.
32:54He managed to get many of the secret German documents on the Paris gun project from friends of the Krupp factory.
32:59Using computers, Bull ran calculations to learn all he could from the design and wartime employment of the gun.
33:08During this time, he immersed himself in the subject of World War I.
33:13He often toured the battlefields outside his office in Brussels, Belgium, and read poetry written by soldiers during the war.
33:19He would walk through the graveyards, reading the little crosses, and reciting his poetry, sometimes on his own, sometimes with one of his sons who went with him.
33:32And he would cry, and a great many of them are marked known only unto God.
33:37There's no name, no one knows who lies there.
33:39The reason is that they were blown to pieces by artillery, the very sort of, the very work that he was involved in.
33:47And I really think that he did not make that jump of realizing that the pieces he was producing,
33:56was producing new little crosses on some other land.
34:01He was producing many weeping widows and mothers, as had been produced in the First World War.
34:07When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, the Iraqi military was looking to rebuild its artillery systems,
34:15and members of the Iraqi government approached Gerald Bull.
34:19And in those conversations, he began to tell them about his life ambition,
34:25which was to prove that it would be possible to launch a satellite with a huge gun at a fraction of the cost.
34:32No Arab country had ever launched a satellite, and the notion of an inexpensive gun system that could fire satellites into orbit appealed to Saddam Hussein.
34:42At long last, Gerald Bull thought he'd found someone who shared his vision.
34:53With their financial backing, he set down to develop the greatest gun that anybody would ever have seen.
34:59It would have weighed 2,100 tons. Can you imagine the size of that?
35:09Bull borrowed from his harp gun design, and opted to build the barrel in segments.
35:14In all, they would stretch 512 feet long, nearly one and a half times the length of a soccer field.
35:22The gun would be so powerful, it could fire a 2-ton rocket-assisted shell into orbit.
35:28The Iraqis codenamed the gun Project Babylon, but there were concerns at Dr. Bull's company.
35:38Iraq was embarking on an unprecedented arms build-up.
35:41I did disagree with Project Babylon. I said it was a dangerous project.
35:46My objections to the supergun project were political much more than scientific.
35:52When his son convinced him that his supergun could be seen as a military weapon, Dr. Bull decided to build it discreetly.
36:02The gun was fabricated in separate parts by factories in England, Spain, Holland, and Switzerland.
36:11Many manufacturers were led to believe they were working on a petrochemical project for the Iraqis.
36:17Bull's supergun was now a secret gun.
36:23But he didn't keep it that secret, because he talked a lot.
36:27He didn't understand the dangers of loose lips sinking ships.
36:33My dad was probably the worst secret keeper in the world.
36:39He was a very enthusiastic person. He would talk.
36:43As word leaked that Gerald Bull was getting a second chance at his lifetime dream, pieces of the gun began to arrive in Iraq, upsetting the delicate balance of power in the Middle East.
36:57As a component of Project Babylon, Dr. Bull designed and built a smaller gun, nicknamed Baby Babylon, as a prototype for the larger supergun.
37:11This 40-meter-long gun was first constructed for horizontal testing.
37:18In the summer of 1989, the Iraqis installed the prototype at a secret site at Jabal Hamran, 90 miles north of Baghdad in central Iraq.
37:28The gun was positioned along a mountainside at about 45 degrees, an angle which didn't seem appropriate for high-altitude gun research.
37:36As long as they kept funding Project Babylon, Dr. Bull agreed to assist the Iraqis with other weapons projects.
37:46These other ventures led him down a dangerous path.
37:49My dad was a bit politically naive, and they tagged that project along. They didn't fund the project. But meanwhile, they were asking increasing things from him.
38:03Bull designed a number of advanced mobile artillery systems for the Iraqis that would use supergun technology.
38:13Perhaps the most ominous project Bull worked on was the long-range Iraqi scud missile program.
38:19For Saddam Hussein, the major trouble with his scuds was their restricted range and accuracy.
38:23Like the Paris guns of World War I, they could hit a city, but not an exact target.
38:30To carry a heavier warhead, they also needed more power.
38:33They did ask him at one time to validate some of their work of a missile program in which they basically took some scuds and put them together.
38:42They needed, or they felt they needed, a long-range missile, a missile that could really threaten Israel.
38:51They didn't have that. What they did have were large numbers of Russian scuds.
38:57And they felt that if they tied enough of these scuds together, they would change them from being a short-range missile into at least a medium-range missile.
39:11And Bull agreed with that.
39:13Bull assisted the Iraqis with some of the mathematical calculations in their multi-stage scud rocket program.
39:19It may have been a fateful decision. Israeli intelligence agents were following the project closely.
39:27On at least two occasions, the Iraqis tried to launch one of these cobbled-up, tied-together missiles, and they failed.
39:37But sooner or later, they were going to be successful, and the Israelis knew that.
39:40And friends of Bull, people that Bull had known for years, who were associating with the Israeli government, and certainly some of them, in fact, were, at the time, members of the staff of the Israeli embassy in Paris,
39:55visited Bull in Brussels and talked with him at some length in secret meetings.
40:01Now, we don't know what happened at those meetings, but Bull's colleagues have told me that he emerged from a very worried man.
40:08I think the Israelis realized that he was frightened, and that he might stop, and they wanted to encourage that.
40:17And strange things began to happen to him. He lived in a small apartment just out of the center of Brussels.
40:24He arrived home one day, and the furniture was rearranged in his apartment.
40:29There were little gestures, you might say, nothing that would identify an assailant, but enough to unsettle him.
40:36He did complain about a lot of these things, but not in a way to say, oh, gee, somebody's trying to warn me.
40:44Meanwhile, Dr. Bull and the Iraqis continued to test fire the baby Babylon gun.
40:52Bull became increasingly nervous. He was drinking during the day and taking sleeping pills at night.
40:59His every move was now being watched. On the 22nd of March, 1990, his assistant dropped him off at his apartment.
41:08He was carrying $20,000 in cash.
41:11Inside, he rode the elevator to the sixth floor and stepped out into this hallway, where a killer with a silenced pistol waited in the shadows of an alcove.
41:23Bull turned left to his apartment door, fumbled for his keys, got his keys out, and in fact had put the key in the lock.
41:36The person who had been standing in the alcove then stepped out behind him and fired five shots in straight line right up his back.
41:47He died more or less instantly in a large pool of blood on the floor.
41:51Shortly thereafter, Gerald Bull's body was discovered. His money had not been taken.
42:01It came as a total, entire surprise, and it's a shock. You don't believe it. You go into the Nile for a little while, and then you just sense it, and then you're at loss.
42:15It takes a long while to heal from that.
42:17The Belgian police believe the assassin ran down the stairs, walked out through this back garden, and into a waiting car.
42:28Most experts believe that it was a government-sponsored execution, but which government may never be known.
42:36Some believe the Iraqis no longer trusted Dr. Bull, perhaps fearful that he gave the Israelis details on the super gun, or the Scud missile program.
42:47It could also have been the work of Israel's secret Mossad.
42:53He had many enemies, international enemies. The one that makes the most sense is Israel.
42:59The visits from the Israelis fit the timetable.
43:03He himself felt that it was the Israelis who were threatening him, and the circumstantial evidence would seem to point to that, but you could never prove it.
43:14Acting on an anonymous tip, the British Customs and Excise Department seized the final eight sections of the super gun in November 1990.
43:23During the Persian Gulf War, Israeli concerns over the Scud missiles were borne out.
43:33The Iraqis fired their Scuds at Americans in Saudi Arabia and Israelis in Tel Aviv.
43:39After the war, United Nations inspectors raced to the sites of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and blew up a number of biological and chemical weapons plants.
43:49When they arrived at the super gun sites, they discovered baby Babylon still intact.
43:57The inspectors went to great lengths to ascertain the capabilities of the super gun.
44:05The requirement, according to the Iraqi declaration, was to fire a 600 kilogram projectile about 1,000 kilometers.
44:18If you look back at the work that Gerald Bull did in HAARP, that's quite achievable.
44:24With this size calibre and a rocket-assisted projectile, it could certainly push towards low Earth orbit.
44:29These sections of the super gun barrel were found in a final staging area.
44:36The UN team determined that Project Babylon was a weapons program that destroyed the remains of the guns.
44:43Building a super gun this size may never be attempted again.
44:46I've got a feeling that Gerald Bull was to guns what Werner von Braun was to rockets.
44:55They really wanted to build the biggest and the best.
44:58And at the end of the day, it didn't matter who paid the money so long as they could realize their crazy ambitions.
45:03In the end, one of the tragedies of Bull was that he didn't understand that the technology to which he was tied, gun technology, had passed. The day had passed.
45:16He was very jealous of a development in the United States at Lawrence Livermore where he knew that they were thinking of building a gun which would be capable of sending small payloads into space, particularly for use with the development of a space station.
45:35The sharp, light gas gun at the Lawrence Livermore labs in California uses compressed hydrogen to launch an 11-pound projectile to speeds nearing 9,000 miles an hour.
45:50A methane gas explosion propels a piston down a long pump tube to compress hydrogen to 30,000 pounds per square inch.
46:00The launch tube is connected to the pump tube at a right angle.
46:07Initially, it was thought that this would make it possible to pivot the launch tube to a vertical position, but the gun has yet to be pointed skyward.
46:19Still, it bears the acronym SHARP, which stands for Super High Altitude Research Project.
46:25With a space station in orbit, an inexpensive means of supply would be an attractive notion.
46:36Suppose you forget some small piece of equipment or suddenly need it. How do you get it up there?
46:42If you send it up with a rocket, it costs huge sums. But if you could shoot it up with a gun, it costs almost nothing.
46:50In the last quarter of the 20th century, the conventional artillery has become smaller, not bigger.
47:08Dr. Bull's 155-millimeter gun design is now standard in most of the armies of the world.
47:15What sets the guns of today apart is the super ammunition they fire.
47:22Smart ammunition incorporates sensors that seek out targets and ensure that virtually every shot is lethal.
47:30Every shot is lethal.
47:41But the super guns of the next century may not fire any sort of projectile.
47:47Long the stuff of science fiction, energy and beam weapons are slowly becoming a reality.
47:54One of the most promising of these new projectile-less concepts is the electromagnetic pulse weapon, or EMP.
48:03The EMP is another by-product of the nuclear age.
48:09It was discovered that a nuclear explosion produces a burst of electromagnetic energy,
48:14which disrupts all electronic activity over a vast area.
48:17If you can produce the pulse without the embarrassment of having to fire an atomic bomb, you have got a very, very effective weapon.
48:32This pulse renders inoperable all electronic equipment in its range, disrupting transportation, communication, and computation.
48:45And that's one of the things that the modern army in the 21st century is going to have to guard against,
48:52because everything these days is computer-driven.
48:53There have been reports that the United States Army field tested an electromagnetic pulse device during the 1991 Gulf War.
49:04Government sources will not confirm this.
49:07Because the consequences of the implementation of such a weapon system are staggering,
49:13the very existence of electromagnetic pulse weapons is shrouded in secrecy.
49:17If the electromagnetic pulse weapon can be developed, you've put us back to the 19th century.
49:28We're back to rifles, bayonets, firing over open sites, sending messages by pencil and paper and runners, and flags.
49:36If you take the electronics out of the modern battlefield, that's what you've got left.
49:40And this is a very frightening prospect.
49:44But it does mean that artillery will come back.
49:59The press to develop the next supergun will continue as it has since the dawn of artillery.
50:04Whether the superguns of tomorrow will be used for war or for more peaceful purposes is yet to be seen.
50:34If I want to see the
50:49This will have a feeling where the supergun will only act against the� of the ancient ocupist.
50:56Today, The Void had吃ed.