Australians studying in the US to face tougher social media screening
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce would not confirm the contents of the cable during a briefing in Washington but said the government would 'continue to use every tool we can to assess who it is that's coming here', whether they were students or others.
'Every sovereign country has a right to know who is trying to come in, why they want to come in, who they are, what they've been doing, and at least hopefully within that framework determine what they will be doing while they're here,' she said.
The US embassy in Canberra directed inquiries back to Washington.
The move is one of many that the Trump administration has taken against top US universities, especially Harvard, which President Donald Trump accuses of indulging antisemitism on campus and persisting with affirmative action policies for student admissions.
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The government is directing federal agencies to terminate contracts with Harvard, while Trump said he was considering taking away $US3 billion ($4.67 billion) in grants and giving it to trade schools instead.
Harvard has refused to bow to Trump's demands, instead twice suing the administration, and Trump indicated the university's intransigence was leading him to take harsher action.
'Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper,' he said in the Oval Office on Wednesday (Thursday AEST).
'The last thing I want to do is hurt Harvard. They're hurting themselves, they're fighting,' Trump said, making a comparison to Columbia University in New York, which he said was co-operating.
'But Harvard wants to fight. They want to show how smart they are, and they're getting their ass kicked … every time they fight they lose another $250 million. Yesterday, we found another $100 million.'
The Trump administration has demanded that Harvard supply a list of names of its foreign students, as well as any disciplinary action against them. Trump said on Wednesday that many of these students were 'very radical people' from radicalised countries and 'we don't want them making trouble in our country'.
'Let's be clear, this has nothing to do with combating antisemitism'
Jacob Miller, former president, Harvard Hillel Jewish association
He also suggested Harvard was enrolling too many international students – just shy of 7000, or a quarter of its total – and it should be capped at about 15 per cent. 'We have people [in the US] that want to go to Harvard and other schools; they can't get in.'
Britt Suann, an Australian who has just completed a master of public health on a Fulbright scholarship, said she had 'gotten away with it'. But friends who are continuing on at Harvard were uncertain about where they stood, as were the Australians due to replace the current cohort.
'A lot of them aren't sure if they're going to get their visas or not,' she said. 'A lot of people have already stopped working in preparation for coming over. It's a huge deal.'
David Hogan, who finished a master of real estate, said his phone had blown up with messages from fellow Australians uncertain about their fate. But Hogan, who is a member of the Harvard Republicans, was more relaxed about the situation.
'This is just classic Trump playing hardball. He does it in every single facet of political life,' he said. 'There's uncertainty and people are scared. People forget – if the university just complies, this threat isn't acted upon.'
'We're all freaking out'
A third Australian at Harvard, who did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation by US authorities, is currently in Europe with fellow students and said there was unease among the cohort.
'We're all freaking out being, like, 'can get back into the country?'' she said. She and others had thought about returning to the US early, while the injunction was still in place, but decided not to.
'We don't really want our lives to become bargaining chips,' she said. 'A lot of us have accepted we might become collateral damage. It's still the right thing for Harvard to [fight back], even if it f---ks up my life.'
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Concerns about antisemitism on campus go beyond just Harvard and the Ivy League, following more than 18 months of protests against Israel and its destruction of Gaza, prompted by the October 7 Hamas attacks.
In an interview with National Public Radio this week, Harvard president Alan Garber, who is Jewish, said his university had made substantial progress in combating antisemitism over the past 12 months.
But the most common and disturbing way antisemitism manifested on campus was social exclusion, he said, which was more difficult to manage and meant people were not exposed to different opinions.
'We shouldn't be in an echo chamber. Everyone in our community needs to hear other views,' Garber said. 'That is one reason why it is so important for us to be able to have international students on our campus. There is so much that they contribute to our environment, and they enable everyone else to open their minds.'
At a campus rally, Jacob Miller, a former president of the Jewish association Harvard Hillel, said the Trump administration was using antisemitism as an 'absurd' excuse to target people based on their identity.
'Let's be clear, this has nothing to do with combatting antisemitism,' he said.
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Much of the technology required by Golden Dome has come a long way since the failure of Star Wars – at least, the bits that would be stationed on Earth. (The US has actually been exploring the idea since World War II, when its troops in Europe were threatened by Germany's V2 ballistic rockets.) Today, several countries have missile 'shields', including China, India, Israel, Italy, Russia and Turkey – South Korea is reportedly working on its own home-grown 'dome' – but nothing is at the scale or level of reliability that would be required to defend the entire US homeland. Israel, for example, is smaller than Hawaii and has faced less technologically sophisticated foes – nothing like the peer-level arsenal the US wants to shield against. 'US Navy ships are very capable in shooting down cruise missiles and drones, but they're essentially trying to defend one point, which is themselves,' says Marcus Hellyer, head of research at the think tank Strategic Analysis Australia. 'The more you scale it up from defending one point to a small area such as Israel to large areas such as Ukraine and then on to the continental US, the degree of difficulty and, of course, cost increases as well.' To successfully shield the US from nuclear attack, defensive interceptors would have to detect and destroy ICBMs that travel at speeds in excess of 24,000km/h. 'Defending against ballistic missile attacks is a challenging technical undertaking,' the Congressional Budget Office noted in a 2004 investigation into the practicalities of missile defence. 'In the case of ICBMs, a defensive system may need to hit a warhead smaller than an oil drum that is travelling above the atmosphere … countermeasures such as decoy warheads that may be carried by ICBMs further complicate the problem of intercepting targets.' It's possible to do it from the ground, as a successful military test showed in 2017, but that was under well-rehearsed conditions. 'Engaging ICBMs is not computationally hard because they fly on a simple parabolic arc,' says Sidharth Kaushal at the Royal United Services Institute in London, one of the world's oldest military think tanks. 'But given the speeds involved, it requires a very rapid hand-off of data between multiple systems. Engaging hypersonics is more complex, in computational terms, given the capacity of hypersonic glide vehicles to manoeuvre and their ability to fly beneath surface-based radar for longer than ballistic missiles.' In any case, the current arsenal of interceptors is far too small to provide adequate defence and would be immediately swamped by an attack from a major power, which would likely send many hundreds of missiles, each containing multiple warheads that would have to be targeted individually. The Federation of American Scientists calculates China already has some 600 warheads, with more on the way. The US has some 3700; Russia has more than 4000 (including those that are inactive). Meanwhile, the US has just two bases for what it calls its 'mid-course missile defence program' with the firepower to specifically target incoming intercontinental nuclear-tipped ICBMs: Fort Greely in Alaska, which has 40 interceptor rockets, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, which has four. The rockets are built by Boeing and have a 'kill vehicle' – made by US aerospace manufacturer Raytheon – that detaches from a booster to engage the enemy in orbit, during the 'mid-course' phase of flight. Loading The US also has numerous smaller units that can engage with shorter-range missiles, planes and drones, such as the Aegis ship-board system, the Patriot system used by Ukraine against Russian attacks, and the missile batteries known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defence, or THAAD, which have been successfully used by Israel. Some of these systems could conceivably attempt to intercept ICBMs but would be likely to have a lower strike rate than the much larger rockets deployed in the mid-course missile defence program. In short, shielding the entire US is likely to cost far more than the White House claim of $US175 billion ($270 billion). Weapons company Lockheed Martin, which already makes anti-missile weapons, has likened the Golden Dome to the Manhattan Project (the World War II program that built the atom bombs dropped on Japan) in the scale of its ambition. It will probably top the $US260 billion (in today's money) that funded the Apollo space program through the '60s until 1972. In 2021, Princeton's Frank von Hippel calculated the US had already spent some $US280 billion (in today's dollars) over the previous four decades on anti-missile programs. Star Wars fizzled not only because technology didn't catch up in time, but because of the enormous drain on taxpayer dollars that subsequent administrations decided were better deployed elsewhere, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Democrat senator Ed Markey has branded Golden Dome ' economically ruinous '. 'Mega-projects' like this go wrong, says Marcus Hellyer, 'because you don't understand the requirements, and the requirements keep blowing out. And as the requirements blow out, so does the technical difficulty, and therefore the cost and schedule. And, at the moment, Golden Dome's requirements are essentially unbounded.' What about the space lasers? Miniaturisation, and vast improvements in computing power and data storage, not to mention AI, make the idea of a space defence that can co-ordinate attacks autonomously seem much more technologically feasible than in Reagan's era. Satellite networks such as Elon Musk's 7000-strong Starlink have already proved it is economically possible to launch thousands of small objects into orbit. Loading The not-insignificant hurdle that remains, once these things are in space, is successfully destroying enemy missiles. Do interceptors shoot something at them? Or would they zap them with Reagan's beloved lasers? These days, laser weapons do exist, but they require enormous energy and weigh a lot; typically, they are installed on warships. Says Hellyer: 'It's been really hard to get them to work even against fairly traditional threats like cruise missiles or drones.' Star Wars offers some lessons (the real one, not the film). Many of Edward Teller's claims to Reagan about the prospects of satellites firing lasers made from concentrated X-rays, particle beams and 'microwave devices' were highly exaggerated, says William J. Broad, author of the 1992 exposé Teller's War, and rarely performed as hoped in tests. The popular notion of a giant space station permanently parked above a rogue state that can shoot death rays on command is, thanks to the laws of orbital physics, probably an impossibility. To park it in a geostationary orbit, it would end up 35,000 kilometres away from Earth, which would put its ability to rain down lasers that have enough power to cause damage into the realm of science-fiction. Washington consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton is instead advocating for a reboot of a curious idea that emerged out of Star Wars research called Brilliant Pebbles. A relatively low-tech scheme (at least, compared with lasers), it would deploy swarms of numerous small interceptors into a low-Earth orbit (2000 kilometres or lower altitude), to collide with enemy missiles as they speed past, their great numbers ensuring there are always enough passing over an enemy's territory to be able to intercept missiles in time. So, what's the catch? One would not imagine Russia or China sitting idly by while the US floods their skies with rocket-killing satellites, potentially depriving them of the capacity to respond to a nuclear strike. Both nations – and North Korea – have already condemned Trump's plan as destabilising. 'You could argue that all it does is kind of foster miscalculation,' Hellyer says. Then there are the inevitable countermeasures to overwhelm the anti-missile missiles (the anti-anti-missiles, perhaps) and space defences. 'All defensive systems can be defeated by countermeasures that cost far less,' wrote Charles Bennett of The New York Times in 1989 when Brilliant Pebbles was first proposed. 'The reason for that is simple. It's a lot easier to hit an orbiting satellite than a warhead moving at a vast rate of speed. Moreover, it's also easy to build enough new missiles to numerically overwhelm a defence, or to develop missiles that get into space before interceptors can target them.' Tellingly, the last remaining bilateral arms control treaty between the United States and Russia (the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which limits the number of long-range nuclear weapons) could expire early next year if not extended, opening the door to another arms race. China is believed to have been developing space-based weapons to disable satellites, Brigadier General Shawn Bratton, deputy director of operations at US Space Command in Colorado, said in 2020. Russia has also been considering sci-fi weapons of its own, says RUSI's Sidharth Kaushal, in the form of nuclear-powered jammers (or signal-blockers) and space-based plasma guns. Then there's the money. Star Wars was already on the nose with Congress by 1987, when doubts grew about its promised capability and Reagan continually asked for more funding. Republican senator Jim Coulter warned that the program would be 'bled to death' by budget cuts unless it could demonstrate at least some defences that could be deployed in a few years. 'I think it's just impossible to sustain a vague defence research goal,' he said presciently. The Congressional Budget Office this year estimated that even a skeleton deployment of what it calls 'space-based interceptors' would probably blow the entire Golden Dome budget, costing between $US161 billion ($250 billion) and $US542 billion ($840 billion). The US is also facing a bill in the billions to upgrade its existing nuclear deterrent, Hellyer says. While upgrading the existing Virginia class submarines to nuclear capability will shoulder some of the load, 'The US is facing a situation where it could be spending itself into irrelevance. It'll have an offensive system that's massively undercapitalised and obsolete and isn't the deterrent that it wants it to be. Meanwhile, it'll have this kind of half-baked defensive system that isn't really a deterrent either because any adversary will look at it and go, 'Well, it can't really stop us getting through'. It's the worst of both worlds.' Loading Malcolm Davis says: 'I think what you will end up with is a leaky shield that makes it more difficult for an adversary to get an attack through, and can certainly defend against limited attacks, but it will never be something that will make it impossible for the Russians or the Chinese to attack the United States.' Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, told The Wall Street Journal: 'This missile-defence mirage gives you the illusion you can protect yourself, but you're driving all these countries to build all these hundreds and thousands of missiles.' Says Hellyer: 'What's a satisfactory success rate? Let's say the bad guys launch 100 missiles at you with 1000 warheads. Let's say you have a 90 per cent success rate. Well, that's still 100 getting through.'
