During intercepting the fast targets or the maneuvering targets, the air-to-air missile often need to do large angle maneuver. But in this time, the characteristics of the missile control system become strong-nonlinearity and strong-coupling. And also, using traditional Euler Angles description method, the motion equation of a missile will be singular when the attack angle is big. In this paper the unit quaternion is used to describe the missile attitude and on the basis, the missile attitude control model is linearized by using feedback linearization method. Then sliding mode variable structure controller is designed for the linearization system. Finally, the correctness and the robustness of the control strategy are validated by the simulation results.