Describing himself as once apolitical, Kaku started asking himself questions for the first time, and after finishing at Fort Benning and spending some time in machine-gun training at Fort Lewis, Washington, he joined "Science for the People" at University of California at Berkeley.

A routine blood test there showed the young soldier to be partially diabetic. "Just one of those gifts from God," he calls the results. "You sort of resign yourself to going to Vietnam and then you find you can get out of the military for health reasons."

Making Secrets Not So Secret

Kaku has spent the last five years acting on his grudge against the Pentagon by compiling a book of declassified war plans. To Win a Nuclear War: The Secret Plans of the Pentagon, published by Boston's South End Press, reached bookstores late last month.

Cynthia Peters of South End says the 350-page manuscript "blows away the myth that nuclear weapons prevent nuclear war. This book shows how since 1945, over and over again, policymakers have brought us to the brink of nuclear war."

In the book, Kaku examines U.S. first-strike war plans almost implemented between 1945 and the mid. 60s. The three closest calls, Kaku says, occurred during the Berlin Crisis in 1948, when President Truman prepared to drop 50 atomic bombs on the Soviet Union; during the Korean Conflict in 1954 when Eisenhower almost launched 1000 atomic bombs on targets in the Soviet Union, Korea and Vietnam; and in 1961 after the construction of the Berlin Wall when Kennedy considered firing more than 4000 bombs on the Soviet Union.

None of the three presidents carried out their plans, mainly, Kaku says, because America had no shield. Star Wars, according to him, could make such attacks feasible in the future.

"Star Wars is the missing link to the first-strike. It makes the world safe for nuclear weapons. It's a hoax, basically. It's only applicability is as an offensive system."

A quiet, self-described "wonk" (Kaku says that's "know" spelled backwards) while at Harvard, Kaku played trumpet in the Harvard Band and enrolled in two graduate courses as a sophomore. By his junior year, he had run out of courses to take.

Fascinated with physics since the fourth grade, the Hertz Scholar had never really separated from his books until drill sergeants began thrusting weapons at him.

"[The firearms] made me aware of the misuse ofscience," Klaku says. "It was the draft thatreally changed me."

But he had known since childhood about themerciless consequences of war. Both his parents,who grew up in Japan before moving to America justbefore World War II, spent time in Americanconcentration camps during the war.

Before imprisoning them, the U.S. governmentalotted his parents two weeks--an unusuallylengthy period of time under the circumstances,Kaku says--to "liquidate everything they owned.You would have to put your belongings on the lawnand sell them to your neighbors."

Meanwhile, back in the Kakus' homeland, severalof their relatives died in the Hiroshima blast.The physicist says he "grew up in the shadow ofthe atomic bomb."

Just two summers ago, in Japan for the 40thcommemoration of the bombing, Kaku met a cousinwho miraculously survived in the basement of ahome located near the center of the explosion.