“Forces are finally converging for a genuine debate on President Bush’s missile-defense program. The Republican-controlled Congress is looking for ways to cut $9 billion from the military budget (which, at $420 billion, is getting unmanageable even for hawkish tastes). It’s becoming painfully clear that rogues and terrorists are more likely to attack us with planes and trains than with nuclear missiles. And a recent series of technical studies—bolstered on Thursday by a high-profile Senate hearing—has dramatized just how difficult, if not impossible, this project is going to be.” As readers of FmH know, I have been trying to keep the folly of the missile defense program on everybody’s radar screen, because of my concerns about how destabilizing it would be for the nuclear balance of terror. If Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, is right, the balance may be shifting against support for it on the most pedestrian of grounds — fiscal realism.