EP 087 Project Babylon: Gerald Bull | Conspiracy and Narrative Control

[00:00:00] Tracy Brinkmann: You are about to learn why a Canadian ballistics expert was found dead in his Brussels apartment with a [00:00:05] single bullet in his back on March 22nd of 1990, and why every government [00:00:10] on Earth had a reason to pull that trigger. The project was known as Babylon, and it [00:00:15] would unite every intelligence agency on this planet against one man.

[00:00:19] But here's what they [00:00:20] never told you. The weapon he built, it wasn't even for war. It was meant for something far more [00:00:25] threatening to power itself. It was meant to democratize space. Gerard [00:00:30] Bull was not a spy. He wasn't a mercenary. He was a physicist who believed that access [00:00:35] to space shouldn't be controlled by superpowers, and that belief cost him everything.

[00:00:39] [00:00:40] You, my friend, are about to hear some unapproved thinking.

[00:00:43] Ad Lady: Beneath the headlines, [00:00:45] behind the timelines, there is a story no one wants you to find. Welcome to some [00:00:50] unapproved thinking, where forgotten truths, buried patterns, and [00:00:55] invisible systems rise to the surface. You weren't crazy. You were just early.[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Tracy Brinkmann: Let's begin By 1998, Bull had spent nearly 30 years perfecting [00:01:05] a technology so elegant and so fundamentally dangerous to the existing world [00:01:10] order that it united enemies against him, the Soviet Union and the United States, Iraq [00:01:15] and Iran, Israel, and every Arab nation. They all wanted him dead, or [00:01:20] they wanted him working for them alone.

[00:01:22] You pick which one they really wanted, and when he [00:01:25] refused both, that clock on his life started ticking. Here's the thing nobody [00:01:30] wants you to understand. Gerard Bull wasn't killed because of what it was he built. He [00:01:35] was killed because of what his success proved in building it. He proved that [00:01:40] space weapons didn't need to be expensive.

[00:01:42] They didn't need to be launched from billion-dollar facilities. They [00:01:45] didn't need to belong to just the superpowers. A brilliant man with a gun barrel could do [00:01:50] it. In the 1960s, Bull was already famous. His work with McGill University in [00:01:55] Montreal had revolutionized ballistics theory. He understood something fundamental about physics that [00:02:00] most engineers seem to miss.

[00:02:01] A gun barrel, it's just a tube. A very [00:02:05] precisely engineered tube, yes, but it's just a tube. If you made the tube long enough, smooth [00:02:10] enough, and aimed it correctly, you could achieve velocities that would make conventional rockets [00:02:15] look entirely obsolete. His early experiments were breathtaking in their simplicity.

[00:02:19] He [00:02:20] took surplus artillery barrels, Vietnam-era howitzers that cost almost [00:02:25] nothing in the surplus market, and he began stacking them, literally stacking metal tubes into [00:02:30] longer and longer configurations. He called it HAARP, H-A-R-P, the High [00:02:35] Altitude Research Project. The goal was innocent enough on paper: study the upper atmosphere.

[00:02:39] [00:02:40] Yeah, that's it. Let's launch some weather instruments into space using ballistic force instead of [00:02:45] rockets. But you see where this is gonna go immediately. If you can launch a weather instrument [00:02:50] into space using a gun barrel, you can launch anything into space using a gun barrel: [00:02:55] satellite components, weapons platforms, surveillance equipment.

[00:02:57] You could do it repeatedly. You could do it [00:03:00] cheaply from anywhere, a hillside, a desert, from underground. You wouldn't need [00:03:05] launch pads. You don't need some massive infrastructure. You just need genius and some metal. In [00:03:10] 1968, Bull had successfully fired a Martel projectile 180 [00:03:15] kilometers into the atmosphere, a world record for a gun-fired vehicle that stood [00:03:20] for decades.

[00:03:20] Now, not-- He didn't fire it into orbit, but was close enough to prove that his [00:03:25] concept worked. The US military was both fascinated, and let's be honest, they were terrified. [00:03:30] Fascinated by the military applications, terrified that once the technology was public, then yeah, [00:03:35] anyone could build it. Canada couldn't control it.

[00:03:37] America couldn't monopolize it, so they killed the [00:03:40] project. HAARP was shut down. Funding dried up almost overnight Bull's life [00:03:45] fractured. He spent the next decade designing artillery for anyone who would pay him, most notably [00:03:50] the GC45 Howitzer, a gun so accurate and so far ahead [00:03:55] of anything NATO had fielded that South Africa scooped it up.

[00:03:58] They bought it right away. Argentina [00:04:00] bought it, and eventually Iraq even bought it. Basically, the governments that couldn't build genius [00:04:05] were happy to purchase this genius. What happens next is the pattern that repeats [00:04:10] throughout his story, and it's crucial you understand it because you're seeing this pattern everywhere in your [00:04:15] own time.

[00:04:15] And if you're, if you're not seeing it now, hopefully after you hear this, you're about to start seeing it. [00:04:20] When governments cannot control genius, they try to own it, and when they can't own it, they try to [00:04:25] isolate it. And when they can't isolate it because the isolation doesn't work, they weaponize it against [00:04:30] itself.

[00:04:30] Bull spent the '70s and the '80s trying to commercialize his technology. He [00:04:35] believed, genuinely believed, that private industry could do what governments could not [00:04:40] or would not, that a civilian space gun could be built and operated outside state control. [00:04:45] He was developing plans for a private space launch company decades before Elon Musk was even [00:04:50] born.

[00:04:50] Decades, ladies and gentlemen. But here's where the trap tends to close. By the time Bull was [00:04:55] ready to actually build it, he had a problem. He was broke. Revolutionary physics don't pay the [00:05:00] bills. Patent litigation does pay the bills. Bull had spent his fortune fighting for his [00:05:05] patents while the military industrial complex had simply stolen all his ideas, classified [00:05:10] them, and moved on.

[00:05:11] Yeah, just moved on. Okay? So when Iraq came calling in 1988, [00:05:15] Gerard Bull, he made a choice. He would take their money. Saddam Hussein offered him the funding to [00:05:20] build Project Babylon, the most advanced space gun ever conceived. A super gun, you might call it, [00:05:25] a weapon designed as a space launch vehicle. They started with Baby Babylon, and Baby Babylon [00:05:30] was a prototype forty-six meters long, which was designed to prove the concept before [00:05:35] committing to the full design, which would be a hundred and fifty-six meters long, capable of [00:05:40] launching projectiles into orbit or, depending on the payload, into Tel Aviv.

[00:05:44] I'm just [00:05:45] calling it as I researched it. And Bull wasn't just building a super gun, he was also helping Iraq [00:05:50] extend the range of their Scud missiles, and Israeli intelligence considered that a far more [00:05:55] imminent threat. Every week Bull stayed in Baghdad, the window for a clean solution [00:06:00] narrowed. Now Let's pause here, shall we?

[00:06:02] Let's be precise about what we're being told [00:06:05] versus what actually happened. Western intelligence immediately classified this as an Iraqi [00:06:10] weapons program. And now, don't get me wrong, they weren't wrong, but they weren't telling the complete [00:06:15] truth either. Project Babylon was a space gun. It would've been capable of launching weapons.

[00:06:19] [00:06:20] Yes, that's true. But it would also have been capable of launching satellites, of putting [00:06:25] civilian payloads up there into orbit, of proving that space access doesn't require NASA [00:06:30] or the Soviet space program. It would have proved that a mid-level industrial nation with [00:06:35] engineering competence could bypass the entire Western monopoly on space.

[00:06:39] [00:06:40] That's the weapon that actually terrified them. Not the orbital strike capacity, the [00:06:45] democratization of space access. Bull arrived in Brussels in 1989, [00:06:50] overseeing the construction of Project Babylon's components from European manufacturers. The gun parts were, [00:06:55] were being manufactured across multiple countries, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, divided [00:07:00] into innocuous-seeming industrial components that no single customs inspector [00:07:05] would recognize as part of a super gun.

[00:07:07] Sheffield Forge Masters in Britain was machining the [00:07:10] barrel sections while British customs eventually intercepted these pipes in Teesport in [00:07:15] April of 1990. At that point, it was really too late for Gerard Bull. It was already [00:07:20] happening. It was actually going to happen. Intelligence services, yeah, they were [00:07:25] now in a full panic.

[00:07:26] Which ones you might ask? Well, all of them. The CIA didn't want it. British [00:07:30] intelligence didn't want it. French intelligence didn't want it. Israel was explicitly threatened by it, [00:07:35] and investigative journalist Jordan Thomas later claimed that the Israeli Prime Minister, [00:07:40] Yitzhak Shamir, personally sanctioned the removal of Bull with Mossad Director Nahum [00:07:45] Admoni dispatching a team to Brussels.

[00:07:47] And the Soviet Union, even as it was collapsing, [00:07:50] understood that if one nation proved this concept, every other nation could follow or would [00:07:55] follow. But there's a detail here that matters desperately to the truth that we want to [00:08:00] convey. And that's the person who actually pulled the trigger on March 22nd, 1990, the [00:08:05] person who entered Bull's apartment's building in Brussels, who climbed the stairs to his 40th-floor flat, [00:08:10] who shot him once in the back at close range, and simply walked out.

[00:08:14] We still don't know who [00:08:15] that person is or was. Well, not officially anyway, and not with any certainty. Every [00:08:20] intelligence age- agency had the motive. But here's the truly poisoning part. Some [00:08:25] historians argue that foreign intelligence servants did not kill Gerard Bull at all. They argue he was [00:08:30] killed by the Iraqis, Saddam's own people even, that Bull had become a liability because he [00:08:35] knew too much about the budget, the timeline, and the capacity of Project Babylon, [00:08:40] that he was threatening to go public or cut a deal with another nation.

[00:08:44] Now, [00:08:45] let's think about that logic for a second. Iraq killing their own lead physicist to [00:08:50] protect a weapons program. It doesn't make sense, not entirely. I mean, unless you understand that [00:08:55] once you've taken a dictator's money, once you've proved to them that you can deliver something revolutionary, [00:09:00] you become dangerous.

[00:09:01] You can be bought by someone else. You can demand more money, or you could just [00:09:05] walk away. A dead genius tells no tales. Yeah. But if that's true, and I'm [00:09:10] not saying it is, I'm saying if, then the official story collapses, then it wasn't Western [00:09:15] intelligence protecting the monopoly to space. It was a regime protecting its investment, and every [00:09:20] government that publicly blamed Iraq for the project was happy to let that story stand because [00:09:25] it meant nobody was asking the deeper question.

[00:09:28] And that deeper question was, what [00:09:30] if Gerald Bull succeeded? What if Project Babylon had actually been completed? What if a [00:09:35] space gun had been demonstrated to work and everyone saw that the emperor had no [00:09:40] clothes, that space wasn't actually all that hard to access, that the cost and the [00:09:45] complexity and exclusivity, all of that was artificial.

[00:09:48] Within a year of Bull's death, uh, [00:09:50] Iraq invaded Kuwait, and every physical component of Project Babylon was [00:09:55] located and destroyed by UN weapons inspectors. Yeah, let that one sit for a moment, right? The [00:10:00] steel was scrapped. The documentation was classified. The program was officially erased, [00:10:05] but the technology doesn't die when the genius dies.

[00:10:08] After Bull's assassination, [00:10:10] all the technical documentation on Project Babylon was supposed to have been confiscated or [00:10:15] classified, destroyed officially, but the knowledge was already out there. Bull had published [00:10:20] papers. Other engineers had worked on components. The physics doesn't change just [00:10:25] because one man is shot in the back.

[00:10:26] By the early 2000s, multiple nations were quietly developing [00:10:30] ballistic space launch concepts. Russia built KTRV. North Korea conducted [00:10:35] tests. Even private companies isolated from the main flow of Western aerospace were sketching [00:10:40] concepts that looked suspiciously like Bull's original designs. And now We get [00:10:45] to 2024, where we started watching Elon Musk and SpaceX reduce the cost of space access [00:10:50] to fractions of what it was just a mere 20 years ago.

[00:10:53] We're watching the launch [00:10:55] monopoly begin to shatter. We're watching exactly what Gerard Bull died trying to prove, [00:11:00] that space access is a solved engineering problem if you're not constrained by government [00:11:05] contracts and cost plus budgeting. So here's the trap that closes over [00:11:10] everyone that might be watching this.

[00:11:11] You're being told that Bull was killed because of weapons [00:11:15] proliferation. Well, that's the official story, okay? And it's not entirely false, but it's a [00:11:20] weaponized version of the truth. It frames the narrative so that you'll stop asking what actually threatened [00:11:25] power, and that is the idea that one man with physics knowledge and foreign funding could [00:11:30] prove that technological monopolies are, are extremely brittle.

[00:11:33] The space gun did not need [00:11:35] to work. It just needed to be built, because once it worked, even once, the entire [00:11:40] architecture of who gets to access space would have shifted, and it would have shifted [00:11:45] forever. The decision would have been moved from governments to whoever had the money and the engineers.[00:11:50]

[00:11:50] Gerard Bull understood something that made him dangerous, that technology is fundamentally [00:11:55] democratic, that the barriers to achievement are economics and will, not [00:12:00] physics, that a Canadian ballistics expert working for Iraq could achieve what NASA took [00:12:05] billions to accomplish, and he could achieve it far cheaper.

[00:12:08] And here's what no one tells you about [00:12:10] men like Gerard Bull They don't get remembered as pioneers. They get remembered as footnotes in [00:12:15] someone else's weapons investigation, which is exactly how the people who silenced him want [00:12:20] him to be filed. So let's not file him away in our minds tonight. Every intelligence [00:12:25] service with a stake in who controls the sky had a reason to want this man gone.

[00:12:29] That's [00:12:30] not a conspiracy. That's documented history sitting in the open, in plain sight for anyone [00:12:35] willing to read past just the headline. But means and motive were never the real [00:12:40] story here. The real story is what gets destroyed the moment it threatens to make monopoly [00:12:45] obsolete. Gerard Bull proved with surplus military hardware and a fraction of [00:12:50] NASA's budget that space was never as hard or as expensive or as exclusive [00:12:55] as we've been led to believe.

[00:12:56] The proof was more dangerous to the existing order than any [00:13:00] missile he ever designed. A missile could be intercepted. A missile could be sanctioned. It could be [00:13:05] negotiated. It, it could even be contained. An idea that access to space belongs to anyone [00:13:10] with enough engineering skill and enough nerve, well, that idea cannot be contained once [00:13:15] it's out there.

[00:13:15] It can only be buried along with the man who proved it. So we owe him [00:13:20] something, and I think it's more than a footnote. We owe him the honest version of the question, not [00:13:25] who pulled the trigger. We may never know that answer, and maybe that was always the point. The real [00:13:30] question is what the world quietly inherited the moment they decided silencing him was [00:13:35] worth the risk, and whether you're still paying that debt today every time we're told something is too [00:13:40] hard, too expensive, and maybe even impossible.

[00:13:43] And in the meantime, it was really [00:13:45] just inconvenient for somebody in power. They killed him before we found out. They were right. [00:13:50] You, my friend, have just listened to some unapproved thinking. Tracy out.

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[00:14:01] Thanks for exploring some unapproved thinking. Learn more at [00:14:05] someunapprovedthinking.com. New episodes drop weekly. [00:14:10] Subscribe, share, and keep questioning because the pattern's still playing out, [00:14:15] and next time, we're going [00:14:20] [00:14:25] deeper.