Superguns
* for large military guns see Large-calibre artillery * for the arcade game equipment see SuperGun * the Iraq "Supergun affair" (a contemporary of Arms-to-Iraq The Arms-to-Iraq affair concerned the uncovering of the government-endorsed sale of arms by British companies to Iraq, then under the rule of Saddam Hussein. The scandal contributed to the growing dissatisfaction with the Conservative government o ...

Supergun Affair
The "Supergun" affair was a 1990 political scandal in the United Kingdom that involved two businesses, Sheffield Forgemasters and Walter Somers, Gerald Bull, (then) members of parliament Hal Miller and Nicholas Ridley, the UK's Secret Intelligence Service, a failed prosecution, and components of a "supergun" (as newspaper headlines had it) that the businesses were alleged to have been exporting to Iraq that they and others had contacted the government about in 1988. The collapse of the court case preceded the Arms-to-Iraq case, that involved a different company Matrix Churchill, by four months. Canadian engineer Gerald Bull became interested in the possibility of using 'superguns' in place of rockets to insert payloads into orbit. He lobbied for the start of Project HARP to investigate this concept in the 1960s, using paired ex-US Navy 16"/50 calibre Mark 7 gun barrels welded end-to-end. Three of these 16"/100 (406 mm) guns were emplaced, one in Quebec, Canada, another i ...
[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  

Large-calibre Artillery
The formal definition of large-calibre artillery used by the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA) is "guns, howitzers, artillery pieces, combining the characteristics of a gun, howitzer, mortar, or multiple-launch rocket system, capable of engaging surface targets by delivering primarily indirect fire, with a calibre of 75 millimetres and above". This definition, shared by the Arms Trade Treaty and the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, is derived from a definition in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/36L, which set a threshold of 100mm. Several grammatical changes were made to that latter in 1992 and the threshold was lowered in 2003 to yield the current definition, as endorsed by UN General Assembly Resolution 58/54. Historically, large-calibre weapons have included bombards and siege guns. Late Middle Ages In the context of late medieval siege warfare the term superguns applies to stone-firing bombards with a ball diameter of more ...
[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  

SuperGun
* for large military guns see Large-calibre artillery * for the arcade game equipment see SuperGun * the Iraq "Supergun affair" (a contemporary of Arms-to-Iraq The Arms-to-Iraq affair concerned the uncovering of the government-endorsed sale of arms by British companies to Iraq, then under the rule of Saddam Hussein. The scandal contributed to the growing dissatisfaction with the Conservative government o ...