Hit To Kill: The New Battle Over Shielding America from Missile Attack.

• Author: McGray, Douglas
• Position: Political Booknotes: rouge notion

HIT TO KILL: The New Battle Over Shielding America from Missile Attack

by Bradley Graham Public Affairs, $27.50

AS THE SUMMER CAME TO A close, President Bush was working relentlessly to achieve what then qualified as his top defense priority: building a system to defend the nation and our allies against missile attack. Bush had packed his administration with champions of national missile defense and put the world on notice that he would amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, which bans the kind of missile-defense testing and construction scheduled to begin next year. He had asked Congress for a 57-percent funding increase so that next year he could pump more than $8 billion into a program which, since its mid-1990s resurrection, had offered an expensive, delicately spun, and occasionally covered-up series of failures. Everyone involved in the debate had marked the date in December scheduled for the next test of key missile defense technology. This book, by veteran Washington Post defense reporter Bradley Graham, should have preceded that test during what everyone imagined would be an all-consuming national debate over missile defense.

Instead, September 11 happened, and missile defense disappeared from the front pages. Graham's book, once ahead of the news, now seems passe. Which is unfortunate, because it makes a very good point: that missile defense is one of those Friday the 13th-type Washington issues that keeps coming back to life no matter how many times you think it's died. Sure enough, Bush is still pushing the idea, as his recent agreement with Putin to amend the ABM treaty to allow testing makes clear.

The White House is touting September 11 as proof of America's vulnerability to foreign attack and, by extention, need for a missile defense system (even though the attacks showed that our greatest vulnerability isn't from missiles). By contrast, Hit to Kill articulates a version of the debate usefully frozen in time before September 11, immortalizing the unfortunate positions such missile defense advocates as Curt Weldon (R-PA) seized upon to criticize the Clinton administration: "Because of the president's misguided decision, our children will remain completely unprotected against the weapon of choice for rogue nations and terrorist groups--the missile."

Hit to Kill opens at the dawn of the missile era as German V-2 rocket are "slamming one-ton explosive loads into British neighborhoods." It was also the dawn of...