It was a "no-brainer." Both threats demanded that America build a national missile defense system, capable of intercepting such missiles, as soon as possible.

However, when I asked Congressman Weldon to shift from the SS-25 and contemplate whether his modest missile-defense system could prevent the penetration of an accidentally launched TOPOL-M ICBM from Russia, he responded, "I don't know. That's a question you should ask General Kadish during tomorrow's session." Extending the reasoning, I asked Weldon whether his modest missile-defense system could shield America against a missile, launched by a rogue regime, that was capable of TOPOL-M countermeasures. Weldon again answered that he did not know. But rather than let such doubts linger at a conference designed to celebrate missile defense, Kurt Strauss, director of naval and missile defense systems at Raytheon, rose to deny that Russia possessed such countermeasures.

Presumably, Strauss was unaware of the work of Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet arms control adviser and author of Russian Strategic Modernization: Past and Future. Sokov claims that the TOPOL-M features a booster intended to reduce the duration and altitude of the boost phase, numerous decoys and penetration aids, a hardened warhead and a "side anti-missile maneuver."

Strauss's uninformed denial hints at a much bigger problem, however: the prevalence of advertising over objectivity in a society where the commercialization of war and the cult of technology have reached historic proportions. In The Pursuit of Power historian William McNeill traces the commercialization of war back to mercenary armies in fourteenth-century Italy, pointing out the "remarkable merger of market and military behavior." And Victor Davis Hanson, in Carnage and Culture, sees much the same reason behind the decimation of the Turkish fleet, some two centuries later, by the Christian fleet at Lepanto--"there was nothing in Asia like the European marketplace of ideas devoted to the pursuit of ever more deadly weapons." McNeill concludes that "the arms race that continues to strain world balances...descends directly from the intense interaction in matters military that European states and private entrepreneurs inaugurated during the fourteenth century."

Post-cold war America, virtually alone, luxuriates in this dubious tradition. Yet it was no less than Dwight Eisenhower who warned America in his farewell address: "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the federal government."

Who could have been surprised, then, when Matthew Evangelista conclusively demonstrated, in Innovation and the Arms Race (1988), that commercial opportunities within America's military-industrial complex, much more than any Soviet threat, propelled innovation--and, thus, most of the arms race with the Soviet Union. A year later, the highly respected defense analyst Jacques Gansler identified the uniquely American "technological imperative" of commercialized warfare: "Because we can have it, we must have it." Such impulses caused the United States to run profligate arms races with itself both during and after the cold war. They also explain America's post-cold war adherence to cold war levels of military expenditures and, in part, our missile-defense obsession today.

This technological imperative had its origins in America's "exceptional" historical experience, which it continues to serve. Indeed, so the argument goes, Why should a country on a mission from God sully itself with arms control agreements and other compromises with lesser nations, when its technological prowess will provide its people with the invulnerability necessary for the unimpeded, unilateral fulfillment of their historic destiny?

Such technological utopianism, however, has its costs. In their book The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050, MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray demonstrate the very secondary role that technology has played in past military revolutions. They conclude: "The past thus suggests that pure technological developments without the direction provided by a clear strategic context can easily lead in dangerous directions: either toward ignoring potential enemy responses, or--even more dangerously--into the dead end, graphically illustrated by the floundering of U.S. forces in Vietnam, of a technological sophistication irrelevant to the war actually being fought." (In Hit to Kill, Graham has little to say about military strategy or the commercialization of warfare.)

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