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

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

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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.