Review of Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack

Well into the 1990s, American proponents of an expanded and accelerated missile defence programme suffered disappointments and defeats. Even when the Republicans gained control of Congress after their huge victory in the 1994 mid-term elections, their insistent efforts to force missile defence to the top of the defence-policy agenda were unsuccessful. Repeated attempts in Congress to create a legislative mandate for deploying national missile defences were thwarted. The Republican hopes that this would become a ‘lightening rod’ issue in the 1996 presidential election were sorely disappointed. While the Clinton administration did respond to congressional pressure by altering and accelerating its own missile defence programme (motivated at least in part by domestic politics), there were no decisive victories for proponents in the battle over missile defence. As the decade passed, the list of setbacks for advocates of the vigorous pursuit of national missile defence lengthened. Proponents of missile defence were passionate and persistent, but they did not seem capable of building a winning coalition in support of their objective of rapid moves toward deployment. By 1997, Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace would analyse this sequence of events in an article entitled, ‘Why the Right Lost the Missile Defense Debate’.

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