Project Babylon

Project Babylon was a project with unknown objectives commissioned by the then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to build a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program.

The project began in 1988; it was halted in 1990 after Bull was assassinated, and parts of the superguns were seized in transit around Europe. The components that remained in Iraq were destroyed by the United Nations, after the 1991 Gulf War.

The first of these superguns, "Baby Babylon", was a horizontally mounted device which was simply a prototype for test purposes. It had a bore of 350 mm (13.8 inches), and a barrel length of 46 metres (151 feet), and weighed some 102 tonnes. After conducting tests with lead projectiles, this gun was set up on a hillside at a 45 degree angle. It was expected to achieve a range of 750 km. Although its mass was similar to some World War II German "superguns", it was not designed to be a mobile weapon and therefore it was not considered a security risk by Israel.

The second supergun, "Big Babylon", of which a pair were planned (one to be mounted horizontally, at least for test purposes), was much larger. The barrel was to be 156 metres (512 feet) long, with a bore of 1 metre (3.3 feet). Originally intended to be suspended by cables from a steel framework, it would have been over 100 metres (300 feet) high at the tip. The complete device weighed about 2,100 tonnes (the barrel alone weighed 1,655 tons). It was a space gun intended to shoot projectiles into orbit, a theme of Bull's work since Project HARP. Neither of these devices could be elevated or trained, making them useless for direct military purposes, unless some form of terminal guidance could be used to direct the fired projectile onto its intended target.

It is possible that Big Babylon was intended both to launch satellites and to serve as a weapon, but its ability to fire conventional projectiles in the latter role would have been very limited: in addition to the impossibility of aiming it, it would have had a slow rate of fire, and its firing would have produced a very pronounced "signature" which would have revealed its location. Since it was immobile, it suffered from the same vulnerability as Germany's V-3 cannon, which the RAF readily destroyed in 1944. Also, Iraq already had Scud missiles which would have been far more effective than the outdated supergun technology. However, the gun would have offered greater ranges than the Scud variants then used by the Iraqis, and its projectiles would have been more difficult to intercept.

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