Customer Reviews

America at Risk: The Citizen's Guide to Missile Defense

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In a little over a hundred pages, Dr. Anderson has delivered a "brief" worthy of the best on Capitol Hill about the complex issues of SDI and missile defense at the end of the 1990s. With major Presidential candidates supporting missile defense now, and many of our allies asking for protection against enhanced missile threats, it is vital that taxpayers and policy makers alike know about the political and strategic issues involved. The author, recently a teaching colleague of mine, is an excellent analyst, and this new little book is a gem.

This book puts in perspective the current threat posed by hostile nuclear missiles: That the threat has INCREASED rather than decreased, that the United States has more to lose now than ever from a nuclear attack, and that the prospects for a viable defense are better than ever before. Dr. Anderson also spells out in no uncertain terms the greatest obstacle to a National Missile Defense: President Bill Clinton. The President's foreign policy is not content with providing however many millions of dollars in aid for a nation which openely supports the anti-American Iraqi and Serbian regimes, but he also wishes to appease a Russia which posesses and increasingly unstable nuclear arsenal in the interests of following our "obligations" to an ABM treaty signed in the seventies and abrogated by the USSR within a few years of its adoption. Instead, he wishes to rely on our nuclear deterrent. President Clinton, apparently, does not agree that it is morally wrong to offer defense over vengeance for the American people. I disagree with some technical details of Dr. Anderson's proposed missile defense (a ground-based weapon system would be essential to its success) but other than that I would not hesitate to recommend this book.

A must read for anyone concerned about the security of the United States. Easy to read, it makes complex issues and technology easy to understand. I highly recommend this book.

This little book is quite informative on the basics of missile defense and related government policy, but it is, in actuality, propaganda. The Heritage Foundation is not dedicated to objectively studying the missile defense possibilities and relating its findings to the people. It is about promoting missile defense, partially through rational thought and facts, and partially through scaring the reader ("If we don't get a missile defense up every country in the world is going to launch nukes and we'll all die horrible deaths," that kind of stuff). I also think they critically underplay the ineffectiveness of interceptor missiles, which have not performed well in trials nor in combat (the Patriot was not very effective in the Persian Gulf). They also seem to dodge the technical difficulties countermeasures can present. But this is not a bad book. It can be very informative, as long as the reader understands the agenda of the Heritage Foundation beforehand.

This book is a very informative book, in one sense. If you accept that its intent is to promote the idea of strategic missile defense, then it does provide many good reasons that this should be a priority. However, as the Heritage Foundation's purpose is not objective (one of the Foundation's stated goals is the promotion of NMD), there is no doubt that the flip side of the coin, the negative effects that the attempt to deploy a NMD would create, have been ignored by the author. It is also of note that complex issues like strategic nuclear weapons (and what to do about them) are hardly reducible to simple arguments. The book tries to reduce the issue to a choice of two options: one is to build NMD, the other is to be attacked by nuclear warheads of strategic megaton range yields. This book relies on the fallacy of limited options to sound logical. Therefore, it is a very good example of a persuasive paper, but should not be taken seriously at an analytical level. I am happy to say that most leaders, even those who do support NMD, are not reliant on arguments as simple as this to make a policy decision.