Publication: Air Power History
Publication Date: 22-JUN-02
Format: Online - approximately 1737 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Baucom, Don
Article Excerpt
Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack. By Bradley Graham. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. $27.50 ISBN: 1-586-48086-3
In 1999, Bradley Graham took a year off from his duties as a military and foreign affairs correspondent for the Washington Post to devote his time to a book that would focus on National Missile Defense (NMD). Hit to Kill, the fruit of Graham's sabbatical year, steps logically through the developments that fed into President Clinton's decision of September 2001 not to initiate deployment of the NMD system.
The book is divided into four parts. Part I, "The Threat," provides a brief introduction to missile defense and traces the rise of the rogue nation missile threat. One of this section's more interesting points comes on p. 41, where Graham tells us that Donald Rumsfeld passed out the foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor to members of the intelligence commission that bears his name. Written by Thomas C. Schelling, this foreword discusses why the U.S. intelligence community failed to warn of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 in spite of having all kinds of information pointing toward the attack. "The danger" in intelligence work, Schelling wrote, "is not that we shall read the signals and indications with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations--a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely." One can see a "poverty of expectations" as the possible reason U.S. intelligence at first failed to notice that the North Korean missile test of August 31, 1998 was really...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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