One of the most consistent features of American strategic policy since World War II has been the pursuit of one form or another of ballistic missile defense (BMD). Like a number of other scholars, such as James J. Wirtz, Jeffrey A. Larson, and Roger Handberg, Columba Peoples wonders what accounts for the endurance of American interest in BMD. Where Peoples departs from previous analyses of US BMD policy is in the choice to “eschew the common tendency to treat technology as a discrete object of analysis in the study (and practice) of security, one that is either determinate of or determined by security relations” (p. 249). Concerned with the ways that technology is understood and represented, Peoples uses a critical security studies (CSS) framework to analyze the relationship between technology and security both generally and in terms of the BMD policy of the United States.

One of the several distinct contributions of this book is a rich history of the justificatory logic of BMD policy in the United States. Peoples traces three phases of BMD advocacy, including the advocacy for the pursuit of BMD systems as the atomic age began in the 1950s and 1960s, the revival of BMD development enthusiasm with Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and the wave of BMD advocacy around President George W. Bush's decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty after the turn of the twenty-first century. The level of detail in these historical accounts (especially as it highlights justificatory discourses) is unprecedented in the literature, and an impressive resource in itself.

Another contribution of the book, though, is Peoples's careful and intricate analysis of the histories of BMD advocacy in the United States. Looking at the historical evidence, the author isolates two approaches to dealing with technology and security that can be seen generally in national security politics and specifically in United States BMD politics. As she notes, “the impact of technology on warfare has been a constant consideration of strategists running from Sun Tzu through Clausewitz” and into present-day politics (p. 1). The first of two distinct approaches to answering the question discussed in this book is the “instrumentalist” understanding (p. 77), where the development of technology generally and BMD specifically is determined by security relations: Technologies are tools of existing political and strategic goals. Instrumentalist logic frames technology as a problem-solving mechanism in the efforts of the United States to overcome its enemies. In contrast to the “instrumentalist” approach, the “substantivist” approach suggests that “technology has an autonomous logic of its own which determines a particular form of social organization” (p. 17, citing Richard Wyn Jones). Substantivist discourses present technology as itself a shaping force, and often a shaping force that threatens the United States-as-protagonist.

Taking both of these frameworks together, Peoples shows that the history of BMD advocacy in the United States has been neither fully instrumentalist nor fully substantivist. Instead, the combination of instrumentalist and substantivist discourses in BMD advocacy has allowed US policymakers and their democratic audiences alike to continue both supporting and building BMD systems in the face of serious obstacles. BMD development has faced both consistent technological failures in the building process and serious political questions concerning the gravity of the threat to the United States that BMD is meant to eliminate. Both instrumentalist and substantivist discourses, according to Peoples, are themselves functional political tools, as together they buttress hopes for “technological salvation” (p. 260, citing Bradley S. Klein). As a result, BMD advocates' discourse “fills the gap created by the failure of missile defence testing to date to validate definitively the system's feasibility” (p. 262). She explains that this unique combination of justificatory logics, then, justifies Aaron Karp and Regina Karp's characterization of BMD in the United States as a “fait accompli,” despite the fact that “it remains technically immature, poorly evaluated, largely untried and extremely controversial” (p. 3, citing Karp and Karp).

This coherent account of the apparent paradox of US policy toward BMD is a contribution to the study of weapon policy, yet it is also a contribution to broader discussions on the role of technology in security theory and practice and on the role of CSS in the (inter)discipline of international relations. The discussion of US BMD policy in the book suggests that both the technology and extant understandings of the technology are ambivalent, and that “their use constitutes a form of symbolic power … which, easily misrecognized … as a form of common sense, seeks to foreclose the possibility that there might be other approaches” (p. 270). As such, Peoples contributes to our understandings of the relationship between security and technology by noting that any analysis thereof “needs to be constantly accompanied by attention to the way that the question [of the relationship between security and technology] is being framed and pursued” (p. 270; original emphasis). It is therefore necessary to start interrogating the common sense assumptions in technology policy debates. By taking a critical approach to the question concerning how technology fits in security discourses, this book develops a policy-relevant but intellectually sophisticated derivation of CSS that might be useful even to more traditionally oriented theorists and practitioners of security.

These important contributions and sophisticated analyses, however, leave the reader wanting more in a couple of areas. First, the detailed historical analyses of BMD advocacy in the United States leave out some of the raced and gendered discourses other scholars have identified (see the writings of Cristina Masters, Dawn Nowacki and David S. Gutterman, and G. Hecht), which causes the author to neglect a performative dimension in addition to the instrumentalist and substantivist advocacy strategies, where US BMD policy is communicative of a sense of American-ness. This mirrors a significant weakness in CSS more generally: the tendency to pay attention to material dimensions to the neglect of significations and performances of security, and therefore to assume a universalistic understanding of who merits security and what security should be provided. Second, while the book is strong on the history of American understandings of technology, it would be stronger if it made clear how the author believes that technological discourses and state identity are linked to produce policy outcomes, not only inside but outside of the United States. Particularly, engagement with work like that of Lauren Wilcox, Brent Steele, and Masters that relate states' senses of self to their developments and deployments of military technology would help to explain not only US BMD policy but also variations in military technology policies both across states and over time. Overall, however, this book is impressive both theoretically and empirically, and well worth reading for scholars and policymakers alike.