A Canadian boy genius turns to international villainy: Canada Did What? podcast

He was an all-Canadian whiz kid, a celebrated rocket-engineering prodigy, who wanted to make this country a serious player in the 1960s space race. But when science sidestepped Gerald Bull’s plan to build gargantuan guns that could launch projectiles into orbit, he just … broke. He turned his brilliance in missile design to darker pursuits, building horrible weapons for sinister regimes. If it sounds like a spy novel, it ends like one too, with Bull meeting a violent, mysterious end of his own.

This is episode 5 of season 2 of Canada Did What? For previous episodes and seasons please subscribe below.

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Canada Did What? Season 2, Episode 5 unedited transcript

Host, Tristin Hopper:  Let’s review some Canadian inventors, shall we?

A Canadian invented kerosene, which was literally the first mass-market use for petroleum. We always knew there was oil in the ground, but before kerosene, we didn’t know what to do with it.

A Canadian invented the foghorn. Before New Brunswick’s Robert Foulis hit upon the idea of blowing steam through a low-frequency horn, you just had to hope that ships didn’t smash into land during foggy conditions – and they often did.

A Canadian invented time zones. Before engineer Sandford Fleming hit upon the idea of time-based global subdivisions, nobody ever really knew what time it was.

But what if I told you there that there is a Canadian inventor whose genius arguably eclipses all of these? A Canadian visionary who, under different circumstances, would have become such a beloved icon of national prestige that we’d be putting him on postage stamps or naming university wings after him.

But instead, you’ve probably never heard of him. Why? Because, well … he used his genius to build a giant, country-destroying supergun for the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He essentially became a fiendish secondary character in a real-life James Bond movie. And as we’ll learn, he suffered the same fate as a fiendish side secondary character in a James Bond movie.

I’m Tristin Hopper, host of Canada Did What?! and today we’ll be learning about how a bright boy from Kingston, Ontario who had dreams of conquering the stars ended up instead embarking down the path of becoming a supervillain. Or, at the very least, an accessory to supervillainy.

It’s a story that involves secret space cannons, shadowy assassinations, international arms smuggling and cameo appearances from all the most famous evil governments from the late 20th century: Apartheid South Africa. Baathist Iraq, Islamist Iran. But most of all, it’s the story of how an ambitious Canadian genius could have changed the world for the better, but instead lost his damned mind and got tens of thousands of people killed as a result.

Our story starts in the early 1960s. That’s when our protagonist, Gerald Bull, is starting to make a name for himself in Canada as the project lead on a supercool scientific aerospace research project called Project HARP.

Bull was some kind of genius. At the time, he was the youngest ever person to have received a PhD from the University of Toronto at just 22 years old. The project he was working on, HARP, stands for High Altitude Research Project, and it was a Canadian initiative, funded by McGill University. The project sounds kind of zany — the idea was to build a giant gun in Barbados in the Caribbean and see how high they could shoot stuff out of it.

Nobody had really done this before. Until then, the whole point of giant guns was to kill people who are very far away from you; how high the projectile travels before doing the killing was just incidental.

But this wasn’t about weapons or death at all. It was truly meant to be just a science project. Because it turns out there are plenty of beneficiary applications to building giant guns.

If you can fire artillery shells into the upper atmosphere, you’ve suddenly got a cheap way to do everything from predicting the weather to studying the aurora borealis. And presumably, for space travel, you could also reach orbit for a fraction of the cost that it takes to reach leave the atmosphere in a self-propelled rocket.

Bull designed artillery shells specially designed to fly as high as possible. And you know what he called them? Martlets. Because Martlets are the cute little birds on the McGill University logo.

Archival audio clip:   “Here’s a model of the Martlet space shell fired recently in Barbados as part of Canada’s McGill University High Altitude Research program.”

In 1966, a Martlet launched from the HARP gun broke the record for an artillery projectile, reaching an altitude of 180 kilometres — into or low earth orbit, well beyond the boundary into space.

This project made Gerald Bull a bit of a scientific hero. Sort of like a Canadian version of Werner Von Braun, who led America’s rocket program.  At the time, you had newspapers patriotically declaring that, with Bull as our guide, there would be a Canadian-designed and Canadian-launched satellite in orbit by 1967, our centennial year.

This was Gerald Bull at his best. A brilliant Canadian patriot and dedicated scientist boldly expanding the frontiers of human understanding.

And it’s time to introduce our guest, James Adams, a biographer of Gerald Bull. He’s also had an extensive career in U.S. intelligence. So when we ask him questions about spy craft, he’s speaking from experience.

Guest, James Adams: If you look at the characteristics of the visionary entrepreneur, which I think he definitely was, they tend to have the grand vision. He definitely had that. They tend to be obsessive. He was definitely that.

He tends to be a very difficult person to deal with. He suffered fools not gladly at all. And that’s also common. And I think in the era that he was dealing with, which was the 80s, the 70s, 80s, that period, it was before much of the gold rush that we’ve seen since then. The venture capital world was really just getting going, the appetite for very big gambles risk taking.

And so if you look at Elon Musk fits into all the characteristics I’ve just outlined. Jeff Bezos at Amazon Ditto. You take Sam Altman today, and Anthropic, OpenAI, all of those things. You could see Gerry Bull fitting into some of those.

But the fact of the matter was his visionary ideas for space were before their time. And look what Elon Musk has done with Starlink putting satellites into space, the thousands of them, Amazon’s going the same route. That’s all 30 years after, 40 years after Jerry Ball sought to do the same thing. He could, if he’d been born 20 years later, or could have been doing his stuff 20 years later, it could have all had a very different outcome.

Hopper:  Now let’s smash cut to the late 1980s, just 25 years later

Gerald Bull has invented the world’s longest-range and most powerful cannon. This cannon is for killing people, and it’s very good at it. And Bull had turned around and sold it illegally to Apartheid South Africa, for which he’d spend time in U.S. prison.

South Africa had been fighting a long-running border war with rebels in what is now Namibia. And the GC-45 very quickly gave South Africa the advantage, because now they could level enemy positions without worrying about anybody shooting back. The rebel’s cannons couldn’t reach any longer.

Bull’s deadly super cannons also found their way into the hands of both sides of the long and brutal Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

And while Gerald Bull was a vocal anti-Communist that didn’t stop him from selling his super-cannons to Communist China, which then copied and resold the guns to other ruthless dictatorships.

If you were to estimate how many people died violent deaths because of something that Gerald Bull invented, you’re probably looking at the thousands, if not tens of thousands of deaths.

Oh, and as mentioned, he was really close with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. And at the time of Bull’s mysterious and untimely death in 1990 (more on that later) he was building for Saddam Hussein the largest gun ever in history.

This is the point in the story where it might be tempting for us to disown Gerald Bull’s Canadian-ness.

Maybe we wish he was one of those guys who was born in Canada but moved abroad at an early age, and all his formative years were spent  in one of those sinister countries that produce amoral arms dealers.

But no, Bull was extremely Canadian. Cartoonishly so, in fact. Here’s how his story began:

He grew up on a southeastern  Ontario apple orchard overlooking the St. Lawrence River. He was bilingual. His grandfather was a French-Canadian gold prospector who lived with the Algonquin people. His dad had been a candidate in the 1923 Ontario provincial election. His family tree was full of United Empire Loyalists who had resisted the American Revolution.

His education was 100 per cent Canadian universities. Queen’s and the University of Toronto. And he got his engineering training in the not-insubstantial Canadian military industrial complex of the late 1940s and 1950s. This was an era in which Canada still built its own warplanes and armaments, so for an up-and-coming engineer, especially a clearly gifted one, there were plenty of opportunities to play with wind tunnels or experimental rockets.

One of Bull’s first engineering jobs was as a research scientist on Project Velvet Glove, a Canadian project to design missiles for airplanes to shoot down other airplanes.

The Postwar Era was a very optimistic time for Canada, and Gerald Bull had barely hit adulthood before he was being held up as the pinnacle of what this country could achieve. While he was still in his 20s, Maclean’s Magazine featured him in a photo essay titled —  “Jerry Bull — Boy Rocket Scientist.”

Bull’s life mission – the dream that followed him throughout his entire professional career – was that if you could build a big enough gun, you could colonize space. He’d conceived of it during his research for Velvet Glove, the airplane missile program. To save money on wind tunnels used to test the missiles, he just fired model rockets out of a large gun to test their aerodynamics. And — he figured —  if he was already firing around model rockets, why not real rockets, like the Apollo rockets that were being launched by NASA.

The idea wasn’t crazy: After all, instead of using a huge fuel-powered engine to get missiles or rockets into space, you could just take a really small missile, shoot it really high in the air with a gun, and then it would only need a little bit of fuel to complete its journey further out.

If you look at the one factor that’s most held back space exploration over the past six decades, it’s cost: The blunt, inescapable expense of taking something that’s on the earth and forcing it with raw, fiery and intense power through a thick atmosphere, against the weight of so much gravity trying to force it back down to earth, for miles and miles, until it finally breaks free.

During the Space Shuttle era, putting things into space cost about $30,000 per pound. Bull figured that with space guns, you could get that as low as $5000 per pound.

You can’t launch astronauts in a space gun: The violence of the initial shot would kill them. But you could presumably launch … well… other stuff. Like satellites. You could pack them into a special artillery shells, shoot them at the sky — and they won’t come down. From there, they begin their orbit around the earth..

If Bull had figured it out, it would have radically transformed space technology right from the get-go.

The best estimates at the time were that Bull’s technology would yield satellite launches that would be at least 10 times cheaper than with rockets. If he’s been given a solid few years to figure out his orbit gun, it’s possible he would have given the world relatively dirt cheap satellites as early as the late 1960s. Satellite imaging, GPS, satellite telecommunications  — we might have had all of them hitting the market decades ahead of when they actually became feasible. And we would be decades ahead in terms of technological development by now.

This was the goal of the HARP project, founded by Bull in 1961. Get to space not with fuel-powered rockets, but through a side door, so to speak. And, to possibly, allow Canada to claim its own niche corner of the space race.

The U.S. and Russians could claim all the more glamourous prizes: First man in space, first orbit, first moon landing, first space walk. But Canada would be who you’d call when you wanted to get a lot of cargo into the sky for pennies on the dollar.

The HARP project got funding from the Canadian and American governments but it really was about as inexpensive as space research gets. The tests were all done with surplus U.S. Navy guns bolted together. The rocket casings were made out of cheap, wound fiberglass.

And the rockets were sailing higher and higher with each launch. They’d successfully done two-stage rockets, and the thinking was that if they could just get it up to three stages, they’d have something capable of getting a payload into orbit.

But then, in 1967, Project HARP loses its funding. The Americans, who had been partly funding it, were getting pretty good at launching missiles the conventional way, so they decide they didn’t need space guns. The Canadians reportedly backed out because they don’t like the optics of building giant guns with the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

You’ve probably heard about another famed Canadian cancellation from around this era. The Avro Arrow, an extremely fast Canadian-designed attack plane that had its funding pulled in 1959, just as the first Arrows were being sent out in test flights.

The plane was obsolete and a bit of a boondoggle, but the argument is that by cancelling the Avro Arrow, Canada put thousands of its brightest aviation minds out of a job, and they all ended up going south and  contributing to U.S.  aerospace advancements instead of Canadian ones.

Well you could make a similar argument about Project HARP, except instead of causing a bunch of Canadian geniuses to flee south to design planes for the Americans, you caused one very particular Canadian genius — one Gerald Vincent Bull — to go nuts and become a notorious international arms dealer.

Because that is indeed where this is going. Although not all at once.

After HARP was cancelled, Bull buys a giant plot of land straddling the Quebec/Vermont border to use as a base for his new project — he calls it Space Research Corporation. His plan is to continue the same super-gun research privately, without any meddling bureaucrats to get in his way.

More than one biography of Gerald Bull mentions how much this resembles something a James Bond villain would do A clandestine mountainous lair bristling with experimental artillery and straddling two countries. And in it you have a brilliant Canadian engineer who does nothing all day except think about how to build giant guns.

And for that, he needs to find money.

This is where Bull’s descent into darkness truly begins.

At first  Space Research Corporation is just another arms dealer — it fills some U.S. and Israeli contracts for artillery shells.

But then comes Bull’s invention of the GC-45.

That stands for Gun Canadian 45 Caliber — it’s the most powerful artillery piece ever made. The technical elements aren’t important, but in short, he came up with a way to reduce drag — the low-pressure vacuum behind a moving object that slows it down — by shooting pressurized gas from a little canister in the base of the shell being fired.

Adams:  He was able to take existing technology and push it further forward. So what that meant was creating a larger bore delivery system barrel, creating a vehicle that would carry the barrel and do so at speed and provide a system that therefore could be deployed more effectively and had much longer range for the delivery.

So instead of being 15 miles, you could actually deliver at 30 or 45 miles. And those were at the time very big changes. When looked at today, it all seems kind of small by comparison or marginal because we have drones that have very, very long ranges, you have helicopters that can do extraordinary amounts of damage at long distances that have stealth technology and so on. But in those days, drones didn’t exist and you were really looking for ground attack vehicles of one kind or another, tanks or artillery.

The mobility that Bull was able to create and deliver to the front line was immensely important. And you can see by the sales that were generated, not by Bull himself, because he wasn’t a very effective businessman, but by the South Africans, the Chinese, they all exploited Bull’s innovative technologies and made a fortune on the back of them. So there was an enormous market available to what he was producing because nobody had done it before.

Hopper:  And who does he first sell it to? The highest bidder, apartheid South Africa. They not only put the gun to work wiping out Namibian rebels, but they reverse engineer it and start selling a knockoff version they make themselves, which eventually finds its way into the Angolan Civil War — and then into the Iran-Iraq War.

It’s not great when your first major customer rips off your product. Making matters worse for Bull, he was caught breaking an international embargo on arms sales to South Africa., Bull was sent to an American prison for six months in 1980 over the GC-45 deal with the apartheid government.

We’ve already touched on Gerald Bull’s Canadian-ness. And one stereotypically Canadian trait does pervade a lot of his career as an arms dealer: Naivete. Again and again, he does incredibly reckless things thinking that nothing bad is going to happen to him or believing assurances from some of the world’s worst people.

Adams:  I think felt he always wanted to belong somewhere and to something and didn’t find that sense of belonging in Canada and found or thought he found a better sense of belonging in the United States. I think all of that seeking of a home, if you like, reflected not so much some kind of psychological yearn, but a naivete that he would be better off over there than over here. And over there was always the next step in the journey. And he was a naïve innocent abroad in many respects. And I think he never found that place he was seeking. And he never found the people that he thought he could trust either.

Hopper:  Naivete is actually one of Canada’s more dangerous traits, from an international security perspective. Canada has lots of both engineering know-how, and strategic resources, like uranium, oil and rare earth minerals. And our guilelessness means we have a tendency to get taken advantage of.

Like the time that Canada accidentally contributed to the global proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1974, India set off its first atomic bomb, and it quickly emerged that they’d gotten the nuclear material for that bomb from us, after we helped them build a nuclear research reactor, and we just took their word for it that it was for peaceful purposes only.

A similar childlike innocence pervades so much of the Gerald Bull story.

Arms and the Man, a 1991 biography of Bull, quotes one of his former office managers, who described him as someone who never “grew up,” and struggled to complete basic tasks like dressing or feeding himself. “Most of the time he was a little boy lost, looking for his mother,” his former manager said.

And Bull claimed to be a pacifist. Even while he was taking meetings about his super gun with representatives of some of the most aggressive and militaristic regimes of the last 50 years. Here’s his wife Mimi from that same biography, “He said that everyone should read about wars so that they would know just how stupid political leaders could be so that they would understand the horrors. He said that if everyone knew how terrible war was, there would be no more fighting.”

In his later years he lived most of the time in Belgium, and one of his hobbies was touring the country’s many First World War battlefields and cemeteries, where he was sometimes known to cry at the gravestones of soldiers who had died while still in their teens.

And yet his own guns were deployed on both sides of the Iran-Iraq war — a conflict that has often been compared to the First World War , with its trenches filled with conscripts being sacrificed as cannon fodder in unending attritional warfare.

There were people around Bull to ask him if he felt bad about this, but he never seemed to. He was haunted by his imprisonment for breaking the arms embargo, he was haunted by threats to his own personal safety after he finds himself targeted after working for dangerous dictators — which he was right to be worried about, as we’ll soon see.

And he was haunted by his company’s frequent financial and legal troubles. But he never seemed haunted by the possibly thousands of violent deaths that his technology had precipitated.

When Bull’s son Michel asked him if he felt any guilt about the carnage wrought by his inventions, Bull replied “I’m no more responsible than the guy who designed the trucks that carried the men to the front.”

Which … fine, but trucks at least have other applications other than killing people from long distances.

Adams:  Well, I think it’s one thing to go through a cemetery and think, my goodness, look at all those dead people buried here. That’s terrible. It’s quite another to go to a war zone and see the results of that directly. I’ve been there, done that.

It is a terrible, terrible experience. I think Bull was both arrogant enough and ignorant enough to not fully take responsibility for what he was doing. And arms manufacturers, arms dealers, arms salesmen, the world over are very, very similar. They choose to blind themselves. And that’s especially true for the scientists involved because it’s the science that is so interesting. It is the development of something cool and new and exciting. That’s what is satisfying.

And it’s not the end result of the work that takes place in the lab or in the design studio. And there is always that disconnect because most of the people in the scientific community never see the results of what they’re doing, ever, and they don’t talk to their friends and say, God, you can’t believe the dead bodies I saw yesterday or anything. I mean, it just doesn’t happen like that. So, I don’t think he was an aberration in that way at all. In fact, he was the norm.

Hopper:  And Bull was more than just a manufacturer. In 1988 he starts getting personally very cozy with officials in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

He’s invited by Saddam’s son-in-law, Brig. Gen. Hussain Kamel, who proceeds to treat Bull to luxury everything: First-class seats on Iraqi Airlines, the best rooms at the Al Rashid Hotel,

Bull is told they’ve been using one of the knockoffs of the GC-45, and they like it. And then, in no uncertain terms, he’s said that Iraq is where his dreams of building all the superguns he can devise can finally come true.

The story given to Bull is that Saddam is just wrapping up its war with Iran, and now he’s embarking on a course of peaceful nation-building. Highways, shopping malls, airports and, naturally, a space program.

So that’s where Bull comes in: “Build your supergun,” the Iraqis tell him, “and together, we will conquer the cosmos.”

But if he believed them, he was being very naïve. What the Iraqis wanted was Bull to develop a whole new fleet of self-propelled  long-range missiles. They needed his help to build it and to get the parts, sneaking around their own weapons embargos.

And Hussain Kamel is wining and dining Bull at the exact same moment that he’s overseeing the development of simultaneous biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

But if Bull was naïve, he also had a chip on his shoulder. He thought he was smarter than everyone else, which was generally true. But his preferred explanation for why his life had been filled with failures and false starts is because he was constantly let down by idiots.

Here’s an interview of Bull from a documentary broadcast after his death and just listen to his contempt at his home country for abandoning Project HARP.

Archive clip of Gerald Bull:   “Canada, in the first years of the 1950s, lived up to everything I expected. That is, we couldn’t be as big as the Americans … but we could be the best at what we were doing, and that was important. It was when the idea of being the best at something dropped into the being a mediocrity, doing nothing, that’s a disheartening thing.”

Hopper:  So here comes Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to tell him, “you are underappreciated, Gerald. They don’t respect you. And you know what? They don’t respect us, either. Let’s show them, together.”

Bull’s dream was that he’d build the Iraqi supergun, soon dubbed Project Babylon, in secret. And then, one morning, the world would wake up to news that, right above their heads, was history’s first object sent into orbit by a gun.

They would all learn that not only had they been wrong about Gerald Bull, but their lack of faith meant that it was now Iraq – and not the United States or Canada – that held the monopoly over the revolutionary new technology of gun-launched space satellites.

The lure of this dream was apparently so overwhelming that Bull sped past plenty of red flags that would have dissuaded a more cautious scientist.

Living in Iraq, he starts noticing that people are following him. His apartment keeps getting broken into, but nothing is being stolen. When he amicably parts ways with one of his employees, his Iraqi handlers tell him, “you know, if you’re worried that he could go to the press to talk about you, we could just kill him.”

Adams:  The idea back then if you could fire a shell a thousand miles you could put potentially a satellite into low Earth orbit. I’m not an engineer, but that feels to me like a very, very heavy lift. You’ve got to assume that a 500-foot-long barrel would stand the pressures of a launch of the size and scale needed. You’d need a long projectile; you’d need an enormous amount of explosive. I just wonder whether you could actually do something that would be repeatable. You might have one go, you might have five goes, but would you really be able to make it a going concern as a business, which would be the exercise? And I would question whether that was possible.

And the reason he was assassinated was not because he was trying to put a satellite into space, but because the gun that he was creating had other applications that made him and the gun very dangerous.

Hopper:  We’ve been hinting this whole episode that Bull ends up dying under somewhat cinematic circumstances, and here they are.

It’s the spring of 1990. Bull is 62 years old. He’s back from his latest trip to Iraq and he’s unlocking the door of his sixth- floor apartment in the suburbs of Brussels. Three shots from a silenced pistol hit him in the back, and then one more shot is fired into his neck. He was killed instantly.

It was a very professional job. Whoever did it made sure to collect the shell casings, leaving no evidence, and obviously wasn’t interested in money. Bull’s suitcase, which contained $20,000 in cash, was found untouched at the crime scene.

We don’t exactly know who killed Gerald Bull, partially because there were so many people who wanted him dead. Bull was involved in a web of secretive, high-stakes military projects that touched several countries’ vital interests.

Maybe Iran, because of his work for Iraq. Maybe Iraq, because they didn’t trust him anymore. Or maybe it was the U.S. or Israel, who didn’t like him helping their dangerous enemy Saddam Hussein. The New York Times even speculated that the British might have done it to stop him from leaking information about their own illegal arms sales to Iraq. Or, the Times speculated, it might have been Chile, which had done some business with Bull that some said had ended badly.

But … it was probably Israel. Israel is very, very good at international assassinations and they often look like this: A quick, clean murder in a European capital with no trace of who did it. This particular hit was actually so clean that when neighbours found Gerald Bull’s body, the crime scene was so clean that they assumed at first he had died of a heart attack; nobody had even heard the gun shots.

Things didn’t have to end in such a wretched way for Gerald Bull. I’m going to go back to the start of his career for a moment to read you an excerpt from a 1964 profile of Project HARP. An awestruck reporter sent down to Barbados described Bull and his compatriots as being imbued with a “continuing optimism mixed with pride.”

“Nearly every launching breach a new frontier in the techniques of space exploration. And of all accomplishments there is none so satisfying as that of the pioneer.”

Just 37 years later, that pioneer lay shot to death in the hallway of a Belgian apartment building, having amassed so many enemies that it’s plausible that any number of governments could have pulled the trigger.

Adams:  I have always felt that they saw him coming, whether it be the CIA or various parts of the U.S. defence establishment, the South Africans, the Chinese, whoever. He was the perfect guy: “We can offer you a bit of money. Will you do this for us?” And just to be asked seems to have been a seductive opportunity for Bull himself. And I think his rage when he was sentenced to jail in America for breaking the arms embargo with South Africa, he never, he could never accept that he’d done anything wrong. His sense of abandonment by the U.S. government and by the CIA — well, come on, what do you expect? And I found that to be in some, I mean, he was so much the innocent abroad, never really understanding what was going on, even when his family warned him, and other friends of his too, would say, “you’ve got to watch out, you’re playing with the big boys now.” And he’d say, ah it’s all going to be fine and all that.

I, you know, this big teddy bear of a guy making all these weapons that were used by bad people to do terrible things, and he never really seemed to understand what was going on. Lots of resentment, lots of anger at bureaucracies, officialdom, the intelligence community, whatever. And maybe I’m just older and more cynical, but he seemed to me to be the dupe and folks must have loved dealing with him because he was a sucker again and again and again.

Hopper:  Bull fits into a familiar scientist archetype: The brilliant visionary who sets out to change the world for the better, but ultimately ends up just figuring out new ways to kill people.

In the mid-1960s, Gerald Bull was the wonder boy who was going to bring Canada into the space age. Instead, his genius and drive were mostly employed in the service of dictators and tyrants.

And in this, his story is almost a mirror image of the man you might call his closest American equivalent. That would be Wernher von Braun, who I mentioned earlier — the designer of the rockets that powered the U.S. space program during the 1960s,

Von Braun did the good-to-evil journey in reverse. He first made his name in Nazi Germany designing groundbreaking rockets — rockets that were then used by Hitler to attack Britain and built by slave labourers who frequently died in the horrible working conditions.

Now if you’d asked Von Braun why he’d helped to rain slave-manufactured Nazi rocket bombs on innocent civilians, he would have told you he was just trying to push the frontiers of rocket technology and ultimately give humanity a ladder to the cosmos. It’s just regrettable he had to do it for Hitler.  He was just as happy, after the war, to be doing it for the United States.

Are Gerald Bull and Wernher von Braun the same sort of person? They were both single-minded visionaries who really just wanted to be left alone to do things that nobody had ever done before. It was secondary to either man who was actually paying them to do this, and why.

So whatever happened to Gerald Bull’s superguns? Well, shortly after he was killed, Iraq invaded Kuwait. And when the U.S.-led coalition quickly drove them out again, all of that great artillery Bull designed for the Iraqis was destroyed — the crews quickly deserted and the guns were pounded into splinters by allied air power.

No one cares about superguns anymore. And Canada may have actively tried to forget that we unleashed Gerald Bull on the world.

But not everyone did.

In 1994, a few years after Operation Desert Storm ended Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, HBO produced a TV movie about the Canadian genius who reached a little too recklessly for the stars and got both himself, and thousands of other people killed in the process.

It was called Doomsday Gun and starred Frank Langella as Gerald Bull, along with Alan Arkin, and Kevin Spacey.

Bull would not go down in history as a pioneering scientific genius like Werner von Braun. When he is remembered at all,  it is mostly for the death and destruction he caused — and, maybe for a mid-budget TV movie of a real-life story that reads like a Hollywood thriller.

Clip of trailer from Doomsday Gun: 

“A scientist who would stop at nothing to build the perfect beast and sell it to the highest bidder. 

Frank Langella as Gerald Bull: “Let ‘em think I’m a fool but I’m playing their game. I just want to build my gun.” 

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