"Bruce Sterling - Think of the Prestige" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Chinese, who proved to be among his most avid customers.

After his American prison sentence ended, Bull abandoned his
strange enclave in the US-Canadian border to work full-time in
Brussels, Belgium. Space Research Corporation was welcomed there,
in Europe's foremost nexus of the global arms trade, a city where
almost anything goes in the way of merchandising war.

In November 1987, Bull was politely contacted in Brussels by the
Iraqi Embassy, and offered an all-expenses paid trip to Bagdad.

From 1980 to 1989, during their prolonged, lethal, and highly
inconclusive war with Iran, Saddam Hussein's regime had spent some
eighty billion dollars on weapons and weapons systems. Saddam
Hussein was especially fond of his Soviet-supplied "Scud" missiles,
which had shaken Iranian morale severely when fired into civilian
centers during the so-called "War of the Cities." To Saddam's mind,
the major trouble with his Scuds was their limited range and accuracy,
and he had invested great effort in gathering the tools and manpower
to improve the Iraqi art of rocketry.

The Iraqis had already bought many of Bull's 155-millimeter
cannon from the South Africans and the Austrians, and they were
most impressed. Thanks to Bull's design genius, the Iraqis actually
owned better, more accurate, and longer-range artillery than the
United States Army did.

Bull did not want to go to jail again, and was reluctant to break
the official embargo on arms shipments to Iraq. He told his would-be
sponsors so, in Bagdad, and the Iraqis were considerate of their
guest's qualms. To Bull's great joy, they took his idea of a peaceful
space cannon very seriously. "Think of the prestige," Bull suggested to
the Iraqi Minister of Industry, and the thought clearly intrigued the
Iraqi official.

The Israelis, in September 1988, had successfully launched their
own Shavit rocket into orbit, an event that had much impressed, and
depressed, the Arab League. Bull promised the Iraqis a launch system
that could place dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Arab satellites into
orbit. *Small* satellites, granted, and unmanned ones; but their
launches would cost as little as five thousand dollars each. Iraq
would become a genuine space power; a minor one by superpower
standards, but the only Arab space power.

And even small satellites were not just for show. Even a minor
space satellite could successfully perform certain surveillance
activities. The American military had proved the usefulness of spy
satellites to Saddam Hussein by passing him spysat intelligence during
worst heat of the Iran-Iraq war.