Bull's Eye

I'll admit, when I got bought this book and began reading it I was quite prepared to dislike Doctor Gerald Bull, the designer of Saddam Hussein's "supergun." After all, what kind of mad scientist would consent to work for a madman like Saddam? Instead of portraying Bull as a 2-dimensional figure the author really made him, if not a sympathetic character then certainly an understandable one. A Canadian patriot, Bull found himself and his work increasingly marginalized. Even after the success of the HARP Project, a joint U.S.-Canadian project which sent a gun-launched projectile higher than any had ever gone before, Bull found himself out of place, a genius when it cam to guns in a world where guided missiles seemed poised to take over the battlefield. His imprisonment for breaking South African sanctions after designing guns and shells for them made him more interested in money than in political niceties. With the Iran-Iraq War going on no one seemed to have as much money to throw around as Saddam did and so his company went to work for Saddam, helping extend the range of his Scud missiles and coming up with a design for the biggest gun in the world. This is a great book. It reads like a novel but it all really happened.

This was a very good book. I bought the book wanting to learn more about Iraq, but got a lot more. The details of the efforts to launch satellites using a super gun was very interesting and the details of artillery gave me insights I did not have before. I was very interested in the contacts he made, South Africa, Israel, China and Iraq and the fact that the US for the most part created him. There are a good amount of facts that seem well put together. The writing is good and there are a good amount of pictures that really help tell the story. I think it is interesting to read this book and some of the other books about the Iraq process to gather WMD arms - the two would have fit together perfectly. I would have liked the author to focus a bit more on what the purposes the Iraq's were going o use the super gun for. If you are interested in these topics then this book is well worth the time.

well researched, well written, not too biased, very well researched. A really interesting, good book about a brillient inventer