Gerald Bull - an epic Montrealer

   This enterprising enterpriser was a top employer in Potton Township, where he remains warmly remembered after his politically-infused assassination in Brussels in 1990.
   He was one of 10 kids born in North Bay to George Toussaint Bull and Gertrude LaBrosse.
   His mom died and his dad became an alcoholic so he was raised by his sister Bernice.
   His uncle had won the Irish Sweetstakes and as a result he attended Jesuit private school.
   He attended the University of Toronto's newly-opened aeronautical school at age 16 but was not an particularly good student. He graduated in1 948.

   Gerald Bull was at McGill in 1963 running something called Project HARP which promised some pretty long distance rocket action.
   He went on to promised to build Iraq a supergun capable of firing a warhead 500 miles.
   His name popped up in the news again earlier this month when the Israel-based news publication Haaretz speculated that a nuclear scientist gunned down in Iran may have been liquidated under circumstances similar to Bull's mysterious death at his Brussels apartment 20 years ago.
  The possibility that Western, or even Israeli, spy agencies are behind the latest assassination [of Iranian nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi] is supported by precedent.
   According to foreign news reports, Israel acted in a similar fashion during the 1960s against German scientists working to develop missiles in Egypt, and during the 1970s against various scientists. These included Egyptians and the Canadian scientist Gerald Bull who worked on Iraq's nuclear and missile projects under Saddam Hussein.
   Bull's brilliant supergun designs had their roots in the High Altitude Research Project (HARP), which he headed from the 1960s. Later, his company, Space Research Corp., developed long-range 155-mm artillery guns and shells that could shoot farther and carry a bigger warhead than any others produced in the world. SRC operated on an 8,000-acre artillery range and research compound that straddled the Canada-U.S. border at Highwater, Que., and North Troy, Vt., about 90 miles southeast of Montreal (some say he once aimed his gun at Coolopolis Towers).
   Bull, who was nicknamed "Canada's Dr. Strangelove," was jailed in 1980 for shipping weapons to Apartheid-era South Africa. After his release, he vowed never to return to North America, according to news reports. After that, says Wikipedia, Bull "moved from project to project in his quest to economically launch a satellite using a huge artillery piece, to which end he designed the Project Babylon "supergun" for the Iraqi government."
   An odd aside: in '03, a Canadian company called Columbiad Launch Services Inc. adapted a launcher based on Bull's cannon design to offer customers a chance to launch the cremated remains of loved ones into space. (See Wired article, paragraph 17.)