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On September 11, 2001, a central critique of missile defence -- that it will be futile against the lowest-tech and most likely type of attack against the United States -- was brought home with terrible force. Yet the programme continues, as it has in one form or another, regardless of political or material conditions, consuming $133 billion over the past fifty years. In a book that combines travelogue and technological assessment, political history and polemic, JoAnn Wypijewski visits some of the places where National Missile Defense lives a real life, where it is tested and researched, and where America's exercise of empire on earth meets its ambitions for space.

Across the geography of missile defense -- from Huntsville, Alabama, to California's Central Coast, to the cliffs of O'ahu, to Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands -- Wypijewski excavates a history of dispossession, of imperial fantasies made real. From the Marshall Islands, she presents pictures of an American suburb serviced by a slum, of some of the world's most sophisticated technology existing offshore from a cholera ward, of a native culture hammered for the sake of a military programme that 'works' only to the extent that it keeps itself going. This is a story of Star Wars quite unlike any other. It argues that the system is best understood not through its expense, faulty tests or political machinations, but through its claims on space, in the history and lives of people on earth.

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