"Bruce Sterling - Think of the Prestige (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

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

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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