The Iraqis felt they would gain a great deal of widely applicable, widely useful scientific knowledge from their association with Bull, whether his work was "peaceful" or not. After all, it was through peaceful research on Project HARP that Bull himself had learned techniques that he had later sold for profit on the arms market. The design of a civilian nose-cone, aiming for the stars, is very little different from that of one descending with a supersonic screech upon sleeping civilians in London.
For the first time in his life, Bull found himself the respected client of a generous patron with vast resources -- and with an imagination of a grandeur to match his own. By 1989, the Iraqis were paying Bull and his company five million dollars a year to redesign their field artillery, with much greater sums in the wings for "Project Babylon" -- the Iraqi space-cannon. Bull had the run of ominous weapons bunkers like the "Saad 16" missile-testing complex in north Iraq, built under contract by Germans, and stuffed with gray-market high-tech equipment from Tektronix, Scientific Atlanta and Hewlett-Packard.
Project Babylon was Bull's grandest vision, now almost within his grasp. The Iraqi space-launcher was to have a barrel five hundred feet long, and would weigh 2,100 tons. It would be supported by a gigantic concrete tower with four recoil mechanisms, these shock-absorbers weighing sixty tons each. The vast, segmented cannon would fire rocket-assisted projectiles the size of a phone booth, into orbit around the Earth.
In August 1989, a smaller prototype, the so-called "Baby Babylon," was constructed at a secret site in Jabal Hamrayn, in central Iraq. "Baby Babylon" could not have put payloads into orbit, but it