Trump Should Not Try to Revive Reagan's Dream

The Atlantic

4 days ago

Donald Trump wants to spend billions of dollars on a successor to President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and he's calling it 'Golden Dome,' inspired by both Israel's Iron Dome defense and Reagan's early-1980s concept of a 'peace shield' over North America. It's a hugely ambitious project, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently would prefer that no one talk about it.
This week, military and civilian experts are in Huntsville, Alabama, for the 2025 Space and Missile Defense Symposium, a gathering of more than 7,000 top experts, military officers, and defense-industry representatives from around the world. One might think that such a jamboree is the obvious place to cheerlead for a new American missile-defense plan. But one would be wrong: The Pentagon has barred anyone from speaking about Golden Dome in public. Instead, according to Politico, representatives of the Missile Defense Agency will join a closed meeting that is not part of, or sponsored by, the symposium.
This shyness about discussing Golden Dome is probably part of Hegeseth's clampdown on Pentagon officials going to meetings at think tanks and attending other public symposia. Still, the choice to go silent at this meeting is strange: Golden Dome is projected to cost gobs of money, and SMDS is exactly the kind of place where the government can tell its story and get science, industry, and the military on the same page.
The official Pentagon announcement about why the Defense Department backed out of public meetings doesn't offer any clues, and doesn't even make much sense:
Golden Dome for America remains a strategic imperative for the Department of Defense. As we continue gathering information from industry, academia, national labs, and other government agencies for support to Golden Dome for America, it would be imprudent for the Department to release further information on this program during these early stages, keeping operational security of this endeavor top of mind.
Operational security? The Pentagon could in theory argue that the meeting with the Missile Defense Agency folks is being held privately to thwart Russian and Chinese spies who might be lurking about the exhibition tables, but the project doesn't even exist yet, and the closed session is only out of the public eye, not classified.
A more likely explanation is that no one is supposed to talk about Golden Dome because no one knows what it is yet. (A Lockheed Martin vice president said: 'Golden Dome is the defense of our nation against all aerial and missile threats,' an unhelpful formulation that probably only means Whatever it is, it will be big and spread among multiple contractors.) If all anyone knows about Golden Dome is that it will be an expensive, all-azimuth defense against everything that flies, then the Pentagon's reluctance to discuss it is understandable.
It's also already a flawed concept: If Trump is indeed basing Golden Dome on Iron Dome, then he doesn't understand the Israeli system. Iron Dome is a regional defense aimed at relatively slow-moving rockets—and not comparable to a national missile defense over the entire United States meant to stop warheads incoming at 20 times the speed of sound. The difference between the two, according to the nuclear-weapons analyst Jeffrey Lewis, is 'the difference between a kayak and a battleship.' Or as the arms-control expert Joe Cirincione put it some years ago, trying to translate the success of Iron Dome's short-range interceptions into an argument for national missile defenses is ''like being good at miniature golf and thinking you can win the Masters.''
Reagan's SDI—or 'Star Wars,' as its critics dubbed it—served its purpose at a particular time in history. I say this with a certain amount of affection for SDI, not least because one of my first jobs in Washington was working on the program. In the mid-1980s, I was hired by a defense contractor to be part of a 'Red Team' of Soviet experts; we were supposed to game out how the Kremlin would react to the American development of space-based missile defenses.
The goal of SDI in those days was not to seal North America under an impenetrable missile shield. To be sure, Reagan pitched the program that way; his intention, he said in a 1983 television address, was to make nuclear missiles 'impotent and obsolete.' But the instructions to our team a few years later made a lot more sense: How, we were asked, can the United States get the Soviet Union to move to a more stable world where defense, rather than instant nuclear attack, would dominate strategic thinking?
This might seem an odd question for readers who are not schooled in the arcana of nuclear strategy. But the basic problem is that long-range nuclear missiles are inherently offensive weapons. They are use-them-or-lose-them systems: They can't hold territory, they can't defend anything, and they are vulnerable to an enemy's first strike. Their only purpose, should war come, is to travel far away, very fast, and destroy the most important enemy targets. In rough order of priority, these would include the enemy's nuclear forces, command-and-control installations, and other military assets; then war-supporting industries, such as steel and energy; and then, if all else is lost, the enemy's cities and the millions of people in them.
The inherent incentive to strike first was—and remains—dangerous and destabilizing, and SDI was supposed to add an element of uncertainty to the Soviet Union's first-strike calculations. If their planning was disrupted by the wild card of space-based defenses against nuclear missiles, perhaps the Soviets would hesitate to go first, thus buying time for both sides.
When the Cold War ended, no one was quite sure what to do with the idea of national missile defense. President George H. W. Bush's administration tried to repurpose SDI as ' GPALS,' or 'Global Protection Against Limited Strikes,' a kind of scaled-down defense against future troublemakers. Bill Clinton's secretary of defense Les Aspin renamed and reorganized the program, and stripped out the space-based elements. Current missile-defense efforts are focused on shooting down small numbers of missiles rather than defending the entire nation from a full-on attack.
So far, shooting down one missile, to say nothing of more, is still an immensely risky proposition. Under controlled, best-case conditions, the Pentagon's chances of successfully intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles run at roughly 50 to 60 percent—a coin toss at best. (Regional defenses against shorter-range launches have a slightly better test record.)
Reagan planted the idea of a North American continental missile defense firmly in the American imagination. But Reagan's people and those who came after them knew that peace shields and domes are impossible. Cities are always going to be vulnerable because of their size and exposure, especially in the United States, whose capital, along with its two largest cities, are all close to the coastline and vulnerable to the kind of close-in, submarine-launched attacks that missile defenses would be unlikely to catch in time.
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The value and strategic wisdom of trying to develop a national missile shield are as debatable now as they were when the efforts to create the first missile-defense systems began in the 1960s. The enemy, as the saying goes, gets a vote, and the Russians and Chinese could not only interpret a new push for national defense as provocative but choose the simple countermeasure of building more weapons to overwhelm that system. (Even the North Koreans could build enough weapons and decoys to overwhelm limited defense.) And during a crisis, American presidents—even the most cold-blooded of them—might not risk relying on a missile-defense system anyway. If the enemy seems about to attack, any commander in chief will be tempted to launch a preemptive strike (especially against a smaller nuclear power) rather than gamble on unproven defenses and take a 50–50 chance that the missiles won't get through
'Golden Dome' probably sounded good to the president, and now no one is going to talk him out of it—especially given that the administration is willing to throw mountains of money at such a program, just as Reagan did. Hegseth can order his people not to talk about it at public gatherings, but at some point, the administration should answer the two most important questions about an expensive system that could destabilize nuclear deterrence: What is Golden Dome supposed to do, and does it have any chance of working?