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

of flame hundreds of feet into the air, a blazing signal for any spy
satellite or surveillance aircraft. The Babylon space cannon, faced
with determined enemies, could have been destroyed after a single
launch.

However, that single launch might well have served to dump a
load of nerve gas, or a nuclear bomb, onto any capital in the world.

Bull wanted Project Babylon to be entirely peaceful; despite his
rationalizations, he was never entirely at ease with military projects.
What Bull truly wanted from his Project Babylon was *prestige.* He
wanted the entire world to know that he, Jerry Bull, had created a
working space program, more or less all by himself. He had never
forgotten what it meant to world opinion to hear the Sputnik beeping
overhead.

For Saddam Hussein, Project Babylon was more than any
merely military weapon: it was a *political* weapon. The prestige
Iraq might gain from the success of such a visionary leap was worth
any number of mere cannon-fodder batallions. It was Hussein's
ambition to lead the Arab world; Bull's cannon was to be a symbol of
Iraqi national potency, a symbol that the long war with the Shi'ite
mullahs had not destroyed Saddam's ambitions for transcendant
greatness.

The Israelis, however, had already proven their willingness to
thwart Saddam Hussein's ambitions by whatever means necessary.
In 1981, they had bombed his Osirak nuclear reactor into rubble. In
1980, a Mossad hit-team had cut the throat of Iraqi nuclear scientist
Yayha El Meshad, in a Paris hotel room.

On March 22, 1990, Dr. Bull was surprised at the door of his
Brussels apartment. He was shot five times, in the neck and in the
back of the head, with a silenced 7.65 millimeter automatic pistol.

His assassin has never been found.



FOR FURTHER READING:



ARMS AND THE MAN: Dr. Gerald Bull, Iraq, and the Supergun by
William Lowther (McClelland- Bantam, Inc., Toronto, 1991)

BULL'S EYE: The Assassination and Life of Supergun Inventor
Gerald Bull by James Adams (Times Books, New York, 1992)