Hit To Kill: The New Battle Over Shielding America from Missile Attack. (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 missile defense. General Electric released a report that concluded--in a phrase missile defense proponents soon would have become accustomed to--"that such a defense was beyond the scope of contemporary technology." By the 1960s, under heavy lobbying from congressional Republicans and the Pentagon, President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara agreed to support a limited missile-defense system, while "the technical debate left the impression that for every expert declaring that missile defense would not work, another was ready to argue that it would." And so on through the 1970s, the Reagan and Bush years, Star Wars, and Brilliant Pebbles, the space-based, kinetic-energy weapons program.

When Bill Clinton became president, he quickly shelved a failing missile defense program in favor of theatre missile defense, a portable system that can pick off short-range missiles in flight. Through the lean years, NMD advocates kept at it. Newt Gingrich included an ambitious program in the Contract with America. Bob Dole was even prepared to ride the issue to the White House until the Congressional Budget Office slapped a discouraging $60 billion price tag on the Dole-Gingrich plan. Activist Republicans returned to the issue two years later, this time from outside the government. Congress deputized the Rumsfeld Commission to audit the intelligence community's read on the imminence of a missile threat from North Korea or Iran.

"If there was a single moment in the late 1990s when events began to turn in favor of those advocating a national missile defense," Graham writes, "this was it." The commission criticized the intelligence community for being too compartmentalized by security clearances and for underestimating the help China or Russia might provide to a country like North Korea or Iran. The commission wound up favoring a missile defense policy "revised to reflect the reality of an environment in which there may be little or no warning" that a country has engineered long-range nuclear muscle.

Graham describes how the commission's report spurred congressional Republicans to action and cowed the intelligence community. North Korea's surprise launch of a rocket capable of hitting Alaska and Hawaii persuaded the Clinton administration to reconsider. "[Albright] and the others had checked their ideology at the door and were responding to a changed strategic environment," Graham writes.

Clinton attributed congressional Republicans' support for missile defense to "theology," but Hit to Kill never examines other motivations, such as special interests--aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin don't appear until Congress starts writing checks. In much of Graham's account, national missile defense seems to have originated in briefing rooms, with minor disagreements over feasibility that only occasionally were made public.

Graham is most penetrating when he questions his array of sources on the construction and testing of the "ex-atmospheric kill vehicle"--the weapon designed to pick off an incoming enemy missile at I5,000 miles per hour. Initially, he explains, the Pentagon invited Boeing and Raytheon to compete for the design contract. Tens of millions of dollars later, Boeing was disqualified for exploiting sensitive Raytheon documents left behind in a Pentagon briefing room. A series of ugly failures followed, including a chemical leak that destroyed one kill vehicle in flight, and a failed booster rocket that tanked another test. In a rare show of heat, Graham reveals how the Pentagon's growing frustration with Boeing as chief contractor brought about the firing or replacement of 40 project managers.

Graham finally takes the debate out of the briefing room to the Marshall Islands for the third flight test of the kill vehicle--whose failure he credits with influencing Clinton's decision not to deploy the system. It is a vivid scene. A Lockheed Martin marketing specialist puts on extra lipstick and kisses the kill vehicle before launch. Greenpeace activists slip onto the island, to be stopped just off the launch pad--not by security, but by the Pentagon's test director and a Lockheed manager who race to the scene in a golf cart. And when the interceptor finally arcs over the ocean and misses its target, Graham is there to document the defeat. Hit to Kill is good. But it may not be a good enough story to draw readers away from a suddenly changing news climate.

DOUGLAS MCGRAY is a contributing writer for Foreign Policy magazine.