And stretching over all this, a shield to protect our populace and economic centers from devastating rocket-borne attack. As one Brookings researcher argued a year and a half ago, missile defense is no longer an ideological issue. It shouldn t raise partisan hackles. No one thinking soundly, logically, would construct a strategic framework with offense only. Not the New York Giants, not America, is how Colin Powell put it bluntly this January.
Missile defense is now a national necessity, and an inevitability.
What it has boiled down to is simply a grand engineering challenge. That is something Americans are very good at. It s time to launch a mini-Manhattan Project to get a continental safety shield up sooner rather than later. And this time it could be Manhattan itself that gets saved as a result.