10 Gargantuan Things Made Solely For Killing People
6. Project Babylon
Saddam Hussein faced a tough time in the late 1980s. His country had just finished a jolly expensive war with Iran and he owed a lot of money to his oil-rich neighbour Kuwait, plus he was in the middle of a tiring genocidal campaign against his country's Kurds. To make himself feel better he decided to build an immense gun, and threw $25 million at an ex-US government engineer named Gerald Bull.
Project Babylon was the result, a series of gargantuan artillery pieces using principles Bull had originally designed as a way to launch satellites without using rockets.
The curious thing about the Iraqi supergun was how little it would actually do. The barrels, planned to be well over 150 metres, couldn't be elevated or traversed so they could only shoot in a straight line from where they were built. As a missile launcher it was way less effective than the SCUD launchers Iraq had anyway. Quite what Saddam intended to do with his massive toys was never established because he had to order the bits from all over the world, the world noticed, and Israel (probably) assassinated Bull in 1990. Some pieces of Project Babylon are still on display today, bearing mute testament to what happens when a genocidal dictator wants to build a huge steel phallus.