Those of you who know and follow me will be aware that over the years my life has taken many strange twists and turns and just occasionally such experiences have been bizarre. One such incident concerned my (unknowing) involvement in helping Saddam Hussein build his so-called supergun.

The "Iraqi Super Gun", known as Project Babylon, was a secretive artillery program designed to build massive guns capable of firing projectiles hundreds of kilometres or even launching payloads into orbit. Commissioned by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1988 the programme aimed to construct a series of "super guns," including a prototype called Baby Babylon (with a range of 750km) and a much larger gun known as Big Babylon. The project combined advanced artillery engineering and Big Babylon harboured  an ambition for space launch capability.

While Baby Babylon would have some limited mobility, both were fundamentally designed to be stationary due to their immense size and were not considered practical as mobile weapons. Big Babylon, which would lay on the side of a mountain facing the desired direction, was seen as a low-cost method to launch satellites, but in addition to that Iraqi officials reportedly intended to use it as a weapon capable of striking distant targets or disabling satellites. The project reflected Iraq’s broader ambition to develop indigenous military technology during the Iran-Iraq War and beyond.

So, what has this got to do with Crypto_Rah I hear you ask?

Very simply, when it came to building the gun(s) the contract was given to two British firms, namely Sheffield Forgemasters and Walter Somers in Halesowen, Birmingham. The former would manufacture the gun barrels and the latter the ancillary parts such as brackets and smaller engineered parts such as cranks, roller bearings etc. At the time Walter Somers was a part of the Folkes Group as was Clarke's Crank and Forge (Lincoln) where I was working at time time (1990-1).

Very simply, Walter Somers subcontracted some of the manufacturing to us in Lincoln and that is how I found myself being an unwitting part in potentially arming Saddam Hussein. While I wasn't an engineer (we primarily had a forge and lathes, but other equipment too) one of my jobs was handling the paperwork including the technical drawings and making sure they got to the engineers in turn. I never built any of the components, but I did hand the engineers the paperwork and instruct them to complete their tasks. The work predominately involved forging each piece individually, rough machining it before finish machining and then polishing. There may have been some drilling involved too, in order to attach the brackets etc. 

Of course the Iraqis kept it all hush-hush and they didn't declare the real purpose of these manufactured pieces, but then it all started to unravel. To get these manufactured components to Iraq they had to cross Europe before being taken by ship from Greece across to Syria and then on to Iraq. However, the gun barrels, were stopped in Greece and checked by a customs agent because of the sanctions that were in place. The paperwork said oil pipes and superficially that was all they looked like.

A part of Big Babylon's gun barrel - or is it an oil pipe?

However a closer inspection revealed rifling on the inside. Rifling is a loose spiral groove in any gun barrel that causes the projectile to spin and thus be more stable in flight. Why would oil need to be rifled he asked himself and from their the whole project came out into the open and stopped before it got anywhere near Iraq. Subsequent inquires looked into it and appropriate remedial actions were taken to ensure that it wouldn't happen again.

And so there you have it, one of my more bizarre moments, the time I unwittingly contributed to almost giving Saddam Hussein a weapon of mass destruction.

As always stay safe and well my friends.