1.   Dole already has used legislative issues such as gun control and strategic missile defense to score political points.

2.   Opponents of missile defense will cite the miss as proof that politics has been driving the development schedule.

3.   The Defense Department has been pressing private contractors for options to speed up deployment of missile defenses.

4.   The principal goal of administration policy has been to persuade others to endorse missile defense.

5.   The proposed test program is inadequate to ensure the necessary reliability before we begin to spend big money on national missile defense.

6.   Until now administration officials have spoken only in very general terms about the possible design, timetable and cost of missile defenses.

7.   When that happens, it will be too late to start building a missile defense.

8.   Also, an American missile defense might protect Taiwan against the missiles Beijing has assembled across the Taiwan Strait.

9.   Alternatively, the Bush administration could seek to protect its missile defenses by utterly dominating space in the ways suggested by the Rumsfeld report.

10.   Although Bush and Rumsfeld have not advocated abandoning the treaty, they have suggested that they will not be bound by its prohibition on developing a missile defense.