Technology and Politics in the Missile Defence Debate: Traditional, Radical and Critical Approaches

American ballistic missile defence remains highly contentious and has been the source of much academic debate. This article undertakes an overview of assessments analysing the rationales behind missile defence. Through the application of a Critical Security Studies perspective, it addresses the underlying assumptions and potential limitations of these assessments. In particular it seeks to show that the current literature on missile defence is predicated on a prior distinction between politics and technology. This, however, is itself problematized within critical approaches as constitutive of a particular mode of thought integral to the maintenance of the very weapons missile defence proposes to address.