U.S. warns of missile threats that it says can be stopped by 'Golden Dome'
China may within a decade possess scores of orbiting missiles with nuclear payloads capable of reaching the U.S. with much shorter flight times than traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the Defense Intelligence Agency said Tuesday.
The agency released a chart as a prelude to a White House announcement regarding threats to the U.S. that the "Golden Dome" missile defense umbrella, a priority of President Donald Trump, would counter.
The chart depicted potential advancements in increased traditional ICBM capabilities among adversaries, including China, Iran and Russia. China, according to the chart, could field as many as 700 nuclear-tipped ICBMs by 2035 up from 400 today; Iran 60, up from none today. Russia's inventory could grow to 400 from 350 now.
More significantly, the chart showed the potential growth in China and less in Russia of orbiting, nuclear-armed space-based missiles in a "Fractional Orbital Bombardment System,' or FOBS.
The weapon enters "a low-altitude orbit before reentering to strike its target, with much shorter flight times if flying the same direction as traditional ICBMs, or can travel over the South Pole to avoid early warning systems and missile defenses,' the agency said. "It releases its payload before completing a full orbit.'
DIA projected China could possess 60 of these weapons by 2035 from none today, and Russia 12 from zero today.
The disclosure in 2021 that China executed a FOBS test flight set off alarms within the U.S. military.
"What we saw was a very significant event of a test of a weapon system. And it is very concerning,' Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an October 2021 interview on Bloomberg Television. "I don't know if it's quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it's very close to that. It has all of our attention.'
Separately, the DIA chart forecast that China might field by 2035 as many as 4,000 "Hypersonic Glide Vehicles,' up from 600 today. The vehicles are launched by ballistic missiles and glide for at least half of their flight to targets. They can be armed with a nuclear warhead, but China may already "have deployed a conventional' weapon "with sufficient range to strike Alaska,' according to the chart.
As of now, the Defense Department and White House have offered few specifics regarding the Golden Dome's architecture, timelines and cost.
"No one has really defined what the Golden Dome is,' Rep. Ken Calvert, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said in an interview last week. "Is it defending the entire Lower 48 and Alaska? What are we doing and how are we doing it? I've heard from every consultant in town that's trying to get in the middle of this thing.'
The U.S. may have to spend as much as $542 billion over 20 years to develop and launch the least proven and likely most contentious segment of the system — the network of space-based interceptors, the Congressional Budget Office said last week.
That network could cost $161 billion even at the low end, the office said in an assessment prepared for a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The price tag will depend on launch costs and the number of weapons put into orbit, it said.
Trump's plan harkens back to former President Ronald Reagan's unfulfilled quest for a space-based missile defense system that was widely known as "Star Wars.'
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"I'm feeling more optimistic after tonight,' he wrote in a text message. "Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.' "This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,' Musk added about an hour later. "'Lasers' from space.' After Trump won, Musk rented a cottage at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect's Florida resort, to assist with the transition. Musk attended personnel meetings and sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders. And he crafted plans to overhaul the federal government under the new Department of Government Efficiency. Family secrets Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies. By 2022, Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together. But while a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Boucher was furious to discover that Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation. Musk was by then sounding an alarm that the world's declining birth rates would lead to the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth. Privately, he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people, according to people aware of the conversations. Collins declined to comment on his relationship with Musk, but said, "Elon is one of the people taking this cause seriously.' Even as Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during a period when he and Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to people familiar with his actions. Boucher reconciled with Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August 2023, she learned that Zilis was expecting a third child with Musk via surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth. Boucher and Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Musk kept X for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified keeping their children out of the spotlight. By mid-2023, unknown to either Boucher or Zilis, Musk had started a romantic relationship with St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City. St. Clair said in an interview that at first, Musk told her he wasn't dating anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that he was romantically involved with Zilis, who went on to become a more visible fixture in Musk's life. St. Clair said that Musk told her he had fathered children around the world, including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child. "He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,' St. Clair said. St. Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his paternity and their relationship quiet. Elon Musk jumps in the air during a rally for Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5 last year. | Doug Mills / The New York Times On election night, St. Clair and Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Trump's victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said. He offered her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for her silence, according to documents reviewed by the Times and first reported by the Journal. But she did not want her son's paternity to be hidden. After she went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Musk to acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support. Musk sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or comments by St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the boy. 'No sympathy for this behavior' Some of Musk's onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic public behavior. In a January newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public intellectual, wrote that Musk had used his social media platform to defame people and promote lies. "There is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,' Harris wrote. Later that month, at a Trump inauguration event, Musk thumped his chest and thrust his hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. "My heart goes out to you,' he told the crowd. "It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.' Musk dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a "positive gesture.' Low, who is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by the performance. He wrote Musk a sharp email, shared with the Times, cursing him "for giving the Nazi salute.' When Musk didn't respond to the message, Low posted his concerns on social media. "I have no sympathy for this behavior,' he wrote on Facebook, referring to the gesture as well as other behaviors. "At some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.' The next month, Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. As he walked onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. "This is the chain saw for bureaucracy!' Musk shouted to the cheering crowd. Some conference organizers told the Times that they did not notice anything out of the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible drug use. This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
