The "Supergun" affair was a 1990 political scandal in the United Kingdom that involved two businesses, Sheffield Forgemasters and Walter Somers, Gerald Bull, members of parliament Hal Miller and Nicholas Ridley, the UK's Secret Intelligence Service, a failed prosecution and components of a "supergun" (asnewspaper 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.[1][2] The collapse of the court case preceded the Arms-to-Iraq case, that involved a different company Matrix Churchill, by four months.[2]
Canadian engineer Gerald Bull 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 to investigate this concept in the 1960s, using paired ex-US Navy 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 gun barrels welded end-to-end. Three of these 16"/100 (406 mm) guns were emplaced, one in Quebec, Canada, another in Barbados, and the third near Yuma, Arizona.[3] HARP was later cancelled, and Bull turned to military designs, eventually developing the GC-45 howitzer. Some years later, Bull interested Saddam Hussein 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, whence it could then drop onto any place on the Earth.[citation needed] Gerald Bull was assassinated in March 1990, terminating development and the parts were confiscated by British customs after the Gulf War.
 | This article related to the politics of the United Kingdom, or its predecessor or constituent states, is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 | This article related to the history of the United Kingdom or its predecessor states is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
