Bull was determined to put a cannon-round into orbit. This burning desire of his was something greater than any merely pragmatic or rational motive. The collapse of the HARP project in 1967 left Bull in command of his own fortunes. He reassembled the wreckage of his odd academic/military career, and started a commercial operation, "Space Research Corporation." In the years to follow, Bull would try hard to sell his space-cannon vision to a number of sponsors, including NATO, the Pentagon, Canada, China, Israel, and finally, Iraq.
In the meantime, the Vietnam War was raging. Bull's researches on projectile aerodynamics had made him, and his company Space Reseach Corporation, into a hot military-industrial property. In pursuit of space research, Bull had invented techniques that lent much greater range and accuracy to conventional artillery rounds. With Bull's ammunition, for instance, US Naval destroyers would be able to cruise miles off the shore of North Vietnam, destroying the best Russian-made shore batteries without any fear of artillery retaliation. Bull's Space Research Corporation was manufacturing the necessary long-range shells in Canada, but his lack of American citizenship was a hindrance in the Pentagon arms trade.
Such was Dr. Bull's perceived strategic importance that this hindrance was neatly avoided; with the sponsorship of Senator Barry Goldwater, Bull became an American citizen by act of Congress. This procedure was a rare honor, previously reserved only for Winston Churchill and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Despite this Senatorial fiat, however, the Navy arms deal eventually fell through. But although the US Navy scorned Dr. Bull's wares, others were not so short-sighted. Bull's extended-range ammunition, and the murderously brilliant cannon that he designed to fire it, found ready markets in Egypt, Israel, Holland, Italy, Britain, Canada, Venezuela, Chile, Thailand, Iran, South Africa, Austria and Somalia.
Dr. Bull created a strange private reserve on the Canadian- American border; a private arms manufactury with its own US and Canadian customs units. This arrangement was very useful, since the arms-export laws of the two countries differed, and SRC's military products could be shipped-out over either national border at will. In this distant enclave on the rural northern border of Vermont, the arms genius built his own artillery range, his own telemetry towers and launch-control buildings, his own radar tracking station, workshops, and machine shops. At its height, the Space Research Corporation employed over three hundred people at this site, and boasted some $15 million worth of advanced equipment.
The downfall of HARP had left Bull disgusted with the government-supported military-scientific establishment. He referred to government researchers as "clowns" and "cocktail scientists," and decided that his own future must lay in the vigorous world of free enterprise. Instead of exploring the upper atmosphere, Bull dedicated his ready intelligence to the refining of lethal munitions. Bull would not sell to the Soviets or their client states, whom he loathed; but he would sell to most anyone else. Bull's cannon are credited with being of great help to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA war in Angola; they were also extensively used by both sides in the Iran-Iraq war.
Dr. Gerald V. Bull, Space Researcher, had become a professional arms dealer. Dr. Bull was not a stellar success as an arms dealer, because by all accounts he had no real head for business. Like many engineers, Bull was obsessed not by entrepreneurial drive, but by the exhilirating lure of technical achievement. The atmosphere at Space Research Corporation was, by all accounts, very collegial; Bull as professor, employees as cherished grad-students. Bull's employees were fiercely loyal to him and felt that he was brilliantly gifted and could accomplish anything.
SRC was never as great a commercial success as Bull's technical genius merited. Bull stumbled badly in 1980. The Carter Administration, annoyed by Bull's extensive deals with the South African military, put Bull in prison for customs violation. This punishment, rather than bringing Bull "to his senses," affected him traumatically. He felt strongly that he had been singled out as a political scapegoat to satisfy the hypocritical, left-leaning, anti- apartheid bureaucrats in Washington. Bull spent seven months in an American prison, reading extensively, and, incidentally, successfully re-designing the prison's heating-plant. Nevertheless, the prison experience left Bull embittered and cynical. While still in prison, Bull was already accepting commercial approaches from the Communist Chinese, who proved to be among his most avid customers.
After his American prison sentence ended, Bull abandoned his strange enclave in the US-Canadian border to work full-time in Brussels, Belgium. Space Research Corporation was welcomed there, in Europe's foremost nexus of the global arms trade, a city where almost anything goes in the way of merchandising war.
In November 1987, Bull was politely contacted in Brussels by the Iraqi Embassy, and offered an all-expenses paid trip to Bagdad.
From 1980 to 1989, during their prolonged, lethal, and highly inconclusive war with Iran, Saddam Hussein's regime had spent some eighty billion dollars on weapons and weapons systems. Saddam Hussein was especially fond of his Soviet-supplied "Scud" missiles, which had shaken Iranian morale severely when fired into civilian centers during the so-called "War of the Cities." To Saddam's mind, the major trouble with his Scuds was their limited range and accuracy, and he had invested great effort in gathering the tools and manpower to improve the Iraqi art of rocketry.
The Iraqis had already bought many of Bull's 155-millimeter cannon from the South Africans and the Austrians, and they were most impressed. Thanks to Bull's design genius, the Iraqis actually owned better, more accurate, and longer-range artillery than the United States Army did.
Bull did not want to go to jail again, and was reluctant to break the official embargo on arms shipments to Iraq. He told his would-be sponsors so, in Bagdad, and the Iraqis were considerate of their guest's qualms. To Bull's great joy, they took his idea of a peaceful space cannon very seriously. "Think of the prestige," Bull suggested to the Iraqi Minister of Industry, and the thought clearly intrigued the Iraqi official.
The Israelis, in September 1988, had successfully launched their own Shavit rocket into orbit, an event that had much impressed, and depressed, the Arab League. Bull promised the Iraqis a launch system that could place dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Arab satellites into orbit. *Small* satellites, granted, and unmanned ones; but their launches would cost as little as five thousand dollars each. Iraq would become a genuine space power; a minor one by superpower standards, but the only Arab space power.
And even small satellites were not just for show. Even a minor space satellite could successfully perform certain surveillance activities. The American military had proved the usefulness of spy satellites to Saddam Hussein by passing him spysat intelligence during worst heat of the Iran-Iraq war.
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.