In scenes fit for a spy novel or movie script, customs officials at a port on Teesside seized several sections of expertly forged steel pipe on April 11th, 1990.
The eight pipe sections were marked up as components for the oil industry and destined for Iraq. But suspicions were aroused and officers from HM Customs believed they were, in fact, sections of the barrel for a huge new “supergun”.
Rumours of plans for such a weapon had been around for some time, although many experts doubted one could be built in reality. Once bolted together, the eight sections would form a gun barrel 130ft long, giving the weapon a theoretical range of up to 600 miles – if it worked.
It was forbidden to export weapons, or components to build them, from Britain to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, so the suspected gun barrel sections were seized and removed from the ship moored at Teesport Docks. Other pieces were seized in Greece and Turkey while in transit to Iraq by truck.
Further investigations led to other components being seized at manufacturing sites in Spain and Switzerland. It seemed several companies in different countries had been commissioned to manufacture components working to supplied plans, but without knowing their true purpose. The barrel sections had been manufactured by specialist engineering firm Forgemasters, in Sheffield, but a spokesman for the company said it was told they were parts for a petrochemicals plant.
The ship taking them to Iraq was registered in the Bahamas and had been chartered by the Iraqi Maritime Organisation. It had called at Hamburg in Germany and the Dutch port of Rotterdam before arriving to pick up its cargo at Teesport Docks, in Middlesbrough. The seizure also led to investigations at a company in the West Midlands which had designed the sections of pipe, but it also denied knowledge of their true purpose.
At the time it was claimed the seizure came about purely through raised vigilance over any goods bound for Iraq, over fears it was preparing for war. Later it was claimed that the British Government had significant intelligence on the plans for a “supergun” and carefully co-ordinated seizing the components and carrying out raids at manufacturing sites.
A spate of arrests followed around Europe and investigations revealed the gun was part of something called “Project Babylon”. It was the brainchild of Canadian large bore weapons expert Dr Gerald Bull, who was assassinated in mysterious circumstances shortly before the parts were discovered. His project comprised plans for two superguns, “Baby Babylon” and “Big Babylon”. The first of these was a prototype, purely for test purposes, and was actually assembled and tested in Iraq, mounted on a hillside at a 45-degree angle.
“Big Babylon” would have been much bigger, with a barrel over 500ft long and more than three feet in diameter. A pair of these “Big Babylon” guns was planned and the barrel sections seized in Middlesbrough were intended to form part of the second one.
As expected, Saddam Hussein did go to war, though without his ‘superguns’. His invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 sparked the first Gulf War against a US-led coalition of 35 nations whose response was codenamed “Operation Desert Storm”. Following Iraq’s defeat in February 1991, weapons inspectors from the United Nations found and destroyed two partially assembled “superguns” in Iraq.
An official report on the supergun affair published in 1992 concluded that the British Government did indeed know more about “Project Babylon” than it admitted at the time of the seizures in Middlesbrough. Several of the barrel sections found there are now on display at the Royal Armouries, Fort Nelson, Portsmouth (pictured above). “Project Babylon” also inspired the plot of author Frederick Forsyth’s novel “The Fist of God” and a 1994 American-made TV movie called “Doomsday Gun”.