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Very good in very good jacket. viii, 209, [5] p. From the Dust Jacket: "Gerald Bull was an extraordinarily complex and multi-faceted man--scientist, arms dealer, multimillionaire, philosopher and prophet. WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS attemps to penetrate that complexity; to look at Bull's family background, his friends and colleagues; to explain the technology involved in his military developments; and to show the effects of his work on events in Canada and throughout the world." From Wikipedia: 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 huge artillery piece, to which end he designed the Project Babylon "supergun" for the Iraqi government. Bull was assassinated outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium. Bull left Canada and moved to Brussels, where a subsidiary of SRC called European Poudreries Réunies de Belgique was based. Bull continued working with the ERFB ammunition design, developing a range of munitions that could be fired from existing weapons. A number of companies designed upgrades to work with older weapons, like the M114 155 mm howitzer, combining a new barrel from the M109 with Bull's ERFB ammunition to produce an improved weapon for relatively low cost. Bull also continued working with the GC-45 design, and soon secured work with The People's Republic of China, and then Iraq. He designed two artillery pieces for the Iraqis: the 155 mm Al-Majnoonan, an updated version of the G5, and a similar set of adaptations applied to the 203 mm US M110 howitzer to produce the 210 mm Al-Fao with a maximum range of 56 km (35 mi) without base bleed. Although it appears the Al-Fao was not put into production, the Al-Majnoonan started replacing Soviet designs as quickly as they could be delivered. When deliveries could not be made quickly enough, additional barrels were delivered from South Africa. The guns were built and sold through Austria. Bull then convinced the Iraqis that they would never be a real power without the capability for space launches. He offered to build a cannon capable of such launches, basically an even larger version of the original HARP design. Saddam Hussein was interested, and work started on "Project Babylon". A smaller 45-meter, 350 mm caliber gun was completed for testing purposes, and Bull then started work on the "real" PC-2 machine, a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2, 100 tonnes, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2, 000-kilogram projectile into orbit. [citation needed] The Iraqis then told Bull they would only go ahead with the project if he would also help with development of their longer-ranged Scud-based missile project. Bull agreed. Construction of the individual sections of the new gun started in England at Sheffield Forgemasters and Matrix Churchill as well as in Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. A section of the Iraqi supergun at Imperial War Museum DuxfordBull concurrently worked on the Scud project, making calculations for the new nose-cone needed for the higher re-entry speeds and temperatures the missile would face. Over a period of a few months following, his apartment suffered several non-robbery break-ins, apparently as a threat or a warning, but he continued to work on the project. In March 1990 he was assassinated, allegedly by Mossad. One account states he was shot five times in the head and back at point blank range while approaching the door of his apartment in Brussels. Another account states he was shot by a three-man team on March 20, 1990, when he answered the doorbell. Gerald Bull had worked for so many parties in so many critical defence projects that he became an asset and a liability for several powerful groups at the same time. It has been speculated that various members of Mossad, the CIA, MI6, Chilean, Iraqi, Iran's VEVAK, or South African government were behind the...
