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

The Story

This an account of the precipitous and politically charged revival of national missile defence. The G. Bush Jr administration has wasted no time in making national missile defence the centerpiece of its national security policy and is expected to move forward with testing and eventual deployment of a system to destroy incoming missiles in flight - even though the Russians, the Chinese, and our own European allies have expressed alarm at such action. The system's defenders say that it must proceed if America is to be secure against nuclear, biological, and chemical threats in the decades to come. There's only one problem: no one has ever shown that such a system would actually work. In Hit to Kill, Bradley Graham, a longtime military and foreign affairs correspondent for The Washington Post, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how national missile defence - once considered a discredited relic of the Cold War - was revived during the 1990s to address an emerging Third World missile threat.