2 comments

  • bookofjoe 2 days ago
  • pseudohadamard 1 day ago
    If you want an interesting related story that's so incredible people wouldn't believe if it was a film plot, look up Otrag. Not the Wikipedia page, that only tells a fraction of the full story. There's a documentary floating around somewhere about their work in Zaire under Mobutu before they started building ballistic missiles for Gaddafi.
    • flohofwoe 9 minutes ago
      Both cases remind me of Project Harp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP). After the project was shut down by the US and Canada, the engineer behind it (Gerald Bull) decided to work for Saddam Hussein to build a "Babylon Cannon" which then caused Mossad to 'intervene' in 1990:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull

      I wonder how many similar but unknown cases there are involving former Soviet scientists and engineers trying their luck with 3rd world despots after the Soviet Union collapsed.