Golden Dome is a glittering gamble — and a likely mistake
U.S. President Donald Trump has a dim view of nuclear weapons. 'We're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive,' he said earlier this year.
He worries about the threat they pose, however. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order (EO) that proclaimed a shift in U.S. missile defense (MD) policy and called for 'a next generation missile shield.' The 'Iron Dome for America' is now the 'Golden Dome.' This project shifts the U.S. focus on defending against the threat from rogue states to a policy that ultimately seeks to deter attacks from peer or near-peer adversaries, like China and Russia. Predictably, those governments issued scathing attacks on the proposal.
They needn't worry. Solutions to the technological demands of such a system are decades away — if ever. More to the point, we've seen this story before. Golden Dome is a retread of former President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars and it too succumbed to financial and physical reality. That doesn't mean that Golden War can't do extraordinary damage to strategic stability in the interim.
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