Iraq, responding to a United Nations deadline to declare its worth in nuclear arms, admitted Thursday it was building superguns capable of firing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons a distance of 1,000 miles.
The guns, whose payloads would be able to reach Tel Aviv and Teheran, were designed by Canadian arms inventor and dealer Gerald Bull.
Bull was assassinated outside his Brussels home in March 1990, a time when giant pipes apparently destined to form parts of the guns were beginning to turn up in European ports.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had claimed the pipes were for Iraq’s petrochemical industry.
The disclosure about the superguns, in a document delivered to U.N. officials July 18, is the latest admission by Baghdad of the existence of weapons it had earlier denied having.
But Iraq did not fully disclose its nuclear potential, and the U.N. allies have therefore not completely ruled out using force against Iraq to elicit that information, the British ambassador to the United Nations said there Thursday.
Under the terms of the April 3 Gulf War cease-fire agreement, Iraq was to disclose and destroy its weapons of mass destruction.
The most recent report, a copy of which was given to the Associated Press by a Western diplomat, reveals that Iraq had “tested” a 14-inch supergun with a 170-foot barrel. The report also admits that Iraq has steel tubes which were intended to form part of an even more massive 40-inch supergun. If completed, the cannon would have been the largest artillery piece in the world.
Other parts of the gun barrel, labeled “petroleum pipes,” were impounded by British Customs agents on April 11, 1990. The parts had been manufactured by Sheffield Forgemasters, a British firm reportedly unaware of their true purpose.
According to William Lowther’s “Arms and the Man: Dr. Gerald Bull, Iraq and the Supergun,” British Customs were likely informed about the barrel sections by M16, the British intelligence agency, which had gotten its information from the Mossad, Israel’s foreign security agency.
The weapons were the life dream of Bull, a ballistics pioneer who had a two-decades-long relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense. A temperamental genius. Bull served four-and-a-half months in an American federal prison in the 1980s for violating the Arms Control Export Act by selling his technology to South Africa.
He subsequently closed his Space Research Corporation complex straddling the Vermont-Quebec border and moved to Belgium, where he entered the shadowy world of arms dealers. Israel was among the first of his clients, buying his advanced 6.2-inch howitzer and 50,000 of his heavy artillery shells.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
