BOOK REVIEW : Tale of Arms Dealer Misfires : BULL’S EYE; The Assassination and Life of Supergun Inventor Gerald Bull <i> by James Adams</i> , Times Books/Random House, $22; 336 pages

Gerald Bull was a genuine visionary with a bizarre obsession, a gifted inventor who devoted his life and work to proving that artillery pieces are preferable to ballistic missiles or “smart” bombs. But he also was a murder victim, killed by one of the machines he labored so long to support.

Too far-fetched to make a credible thriller, Bull’s remarkable story is recounted by James Adams in “Bull’s Eye,” a “cautionary tale” of a “brilliant egotist and ballistics genius” who sold himself and his considerable talent to a series of patrons--South Africa, China and, finally, Iraq--before an assassin’s bullet put an end to his odd and deadly tinkering.

Adams introduces us to Bull as an idealistic young aeronautical engineer, born and educated in Canada, who found himself enthralled with a curiously antique notion: using a cannon instead of a rocket to launch satellites and other scientific payloads into space.

“It was a breathtaking ambition,” Adams writes, “which had as its goal a network of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big guns in countries all over the world, allowing rich and poor countries alike to have almost unlimited access to space.”

Adams offers up this kind of high-flown apologia with a straight face, but we quickly learn that it’s really a lot of Bull.

The strange and secretive cannon-maker, shunned by the defense Establishments of Canada and the United States, soon learned how to put his skills to more warlike--and more profitable--uses.

Bull’s real stock in trade consisted of, as Adams puts it, “a gun and ammunition light-years ahead of anything else in the world.”

His beefed-up field gun and extended-range shells gave the old-fashioned artillery weapon a vastly greater reach and punch.

Bull found ready buyers in Israel, then South Africa, China and Iraq, but he was too volatile, too grandiose, to content himself with the conventional arms trade.

His work for South Africa, which amounted to a covert operation right out a James Bond movie, landed him in prison.

And once he was back in play, Bull found a new and particularly dangerous patron in Saddam Hussein, who indulged Bull’s oldest and oddest conceit as a weapons-maker: the Supergun, a cannon 800 feet long and capable of throwing a projectile 1,000 miles.

The Supergun--code-named Baby Babylon and Big Babylon in the two versions that Bull crafted for Hussein--was so outlandish in its proportions, so grotesque in its very conception, that intelligence agents simply did not understand what they were seeing when they intercepted the crates that contained some of its vital components.

“The Bull gun, which was more than four times larger than anything that had even been previously considered,” writes Adams, “was simply too big to grasp.”

Adams, a hard-bitten investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, is honest enough to admit that the Supergun was a failure of Bull’s peculiar imagination, a weapon of war that was obsolete from conception.

And Adams concedes that Bull appears to have been “a perfect example of the amoral arms dealer prepared to turn a profit whatever the circumstances.”

Still, Adams seems to like Jerry Bull, or at least feel sorry for the poor old coot, and he tries hard to present Bull’s sensitive side: Bull was a weapons-maker who loved poetry, a needful and vulnerable man who was “desperate to belong,” an idealistic scientist who was “a victim of a world his ego and his innocence never allowed him to understand.”

But Adams cannot pretty up the sight of a disturbed and obsessive man whose unfortunate genius happened to be the making of deadly weaponry.

According to Bull’s lawyer, Bull was “the most arrogant person I ever met, narcissistic with visions of grandeur, brilliant yet strangely childish, a manic-depressive.”

And so, despite the author’s sympathetic efforts, we come away from “Bull’s Eye” with the impression that Jerry Bull was, quite literally, a loose cannon.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Dreaming in Cuban” by Christina Garcia (Knopf).