Subject: Iraqi ASAT gluegun
From: thomsona@netcom.com (Allen Thomson)
Date: 1995/09/25
Message-Id: <thomsonaDFHAGI.M01@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.space.policy,alt.politics.org.cia,alt.war
And now, a special offering for connoisseurs of the truly bizarre:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 1995 (UPI)
[EXCERPTS]
The high-ranking Iraqi defector Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majeed said
Iraq was working on a space weapon launched from a "supergun" that
would "blind" Western spy satellites with a "sticky material."
He also said the "supergun," which consisted of a more than 100-
foot artillery barrel that was being constructed in northern Iraq,
could have delivered a nuclear device.
"It was meant for long-range attack and also to blind spy
satellites. Our scientists were seriously working on that. It was
designed to explode a shell in space that would have sprayed a sticky
material on the satellite and blinded it."
If there's anything to this, which I think is still very much
TBD, it has the interesting implication that the Iraqis believed
they could deliver a device to LEO with some precision. The radius
of effective action of a gluebomb probably isn't very great.
Imagine the ignominy of having a billion-dollar spysat slimed to
to death by Iraqi artillery. ;-)
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
