The Pentagon is expected to deliver plans for a “Golden Dome” to Trump this week. In the crudest sense, the Golden Dome is a missile defense system that would shoot nukes, missiles, and drones that threaten the U.S. out of the sky. A scientific study published earlier this month detailed the scientific impossibility of the scheme.
America has tried to build a missile defense system since before Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan wanted to put satellites into space that would use lasers to blast Soviet nukes out of the sky. What we built was somewhat more pedestrian. It also probably won’t work. But defense contractors made a lot of money.
“When engineers have been under intense political pressure to deploy a system, the United States has repeatedly initiated costly programs that proved unable to deal with key technical challenges and were eventually abandoned as their inadequacies became apparent,” explained a new study from the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs.
Under Trump, we’re going to do it again.
Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that called on the Pentagon to come up with a plan for an “Iron Dome for America,” which the President and others have taken to calling a “Golden Dome.” According to the EO, Trump wants a plan that’ll keep the homeland safe from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”
The dream of the Golden Dome is simple: shoot missiles out of the sky before they can do any damage. “It’s important to not simply think of Golden Dome as the next iteration of the ground-based missile defense system or solely a missile defense system because it’s a broader mission than that,” Jonathan Moneymaker, the CEO of BlueHalo, a defense company working on Golden Dome adjacent tech, told Gizmodo.
Moneymaker was clear-eyed about the challenges of building Golden Dome. “Everyone looks at it as a replication of Israel’s Iron Dome, but we have to appreciate that Israel’s the size of New Jersey,” he said.
Israel’s Iron Dome has done a great job shooting down Hamas rockets and Iranian missiles. It’s also covering a small territory and shooting down projectiles that aren’t moving as fast as a nuclear weapon or a Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missile might. The pitch of the Golden Dome is that it would keep the whole of the continental U.S. safe. That’s a massive amount of territory to cover and the system would need to identify, track, and destroy nuclear weapons, drones, and other objects moving at high speed.
That’s like trying to shoot a bullet out of the sky with a bullet. The missile defense study, published on March 3, detailed a few of the challenges facing a potential Golden Dome-style system.
Trump’s executive order is vague and covers a lot of potential threats. “We focus on the fundamental question of whether current and proposed systems intended to defend the United States against nuclear-armed [intercontinental ballistic missile] now effective, or could in the near future be made effective in preventing the death and destruction that a successful attack by North Korea on the United States using such ICBMs would produce.”
Stopping a nuke is the primary promise of a missile system. And if one of these systems can’t stop a nuke then of what use is it?
The study isn’t positive. “This is the most comprehensive, independent scientific study in decades on the feasibility of national ballistic missile defense. Its findings may shock Americans who have not paid much attention to these programs,” Joseph Cirincione told Gimzodo.
Cirincione is the retired president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former Congressional staffer. He investigated missile defense systems and nukes for the House Armed Services Committee. “We have no chance of stopping a determined ballistic missile attack on the United States despite four decades of trying and over $400 billion spent. This is the mother of all scandals,” he said.
The study looked at a few different methods for knocking a North Korean nuke out of the sky. An ICBM launch has three phases: the boost phase which lasts only a few minutes, the midcourse phase which lasts around 20 minutes, and the terminal phase which is less than a minute.
During the boost-phase, the nuke is building up speed and getting into the air. “Boost-phase intercept of ICBMs launched from even a small country like North Korea is challenging,” the study said.
You have to get weapons close to the missile and, in the case of North Korea, that would require building them close to China and then firing them over Chinese territory. Any defense system would only have a few moments to respond to the nuke because the boost phase only lasts a few minutes.
For a countermeasure to hit that ICBM under those time constraints means it would need to be built close, probably somewhere in the Pacific. And we would need a lot of them. China would not be happy about a ring of missile defense systems close to its borders, no matter how America tried to sell it to them.
But what about space-based systems? It’s a territory rivals have less power over. “The scientific review panel found that it would take over a thousand orbiting weapons to counter a single North Korean ballistic missile. Even then, ‘the system would be costly and vulnerable to anti-satellite attacks,’” Cirincione told Gizmodo. Around 3,600 interceptors, to be precise.
So we’re talking about ringing the planet in thousands of munitions-armed satellites. And remember that this is just to handle one nuke launched by North Korea. Imagine scaling up a similar defense shield to guard against all the nukes in Russia and you’ll begin to see the size of the problem.
Well, what about lasers? Reagan’s original plan was lasers. Surely technology has advanced since the 1980s. “There is widespread agreement that laser weapons that could disable ICBMs during their boost-phase, whether based on aircraft, drones, or space platforms, will not be technically feasible within the 15-year time horizon of this study,” the study said.
This hints at another one of the problems of missile defense: it takes a long time to build and your enemies aren’t stagnant while it’s happening. While America works on the Golden Dome, Russia, North Korea, and China will be building their own new and different kinds of weapons meant to circumvent it. We may be able to build lasers capable of shooting nukes out of the sky in two decades but by then America’s enemies may have things to deal with the lasers.
OK, so building the systems to shoot down a nuke in its boost phase is a logistical and geopolitical nightmare. What about during its mid-course arc? There’s more time to do something then, between 20 and 30 minutes. Most of America’s currently deployed missile defense systems are designed to strike an object midcourse.
“The absence of air drag during this phase means that launch debris, such as spent upper stages, deployment and altitude control modules, separation debris and debris from unburned fuel, insulation, and other parts of the booster, as well as missile fragments deliberately created by the offense and light-weight decoys and other penetration aids, all follow the same trajectory as a warhead,” the study said. “This makes it difficult for the defense to discriminate the warhead from other objects in this ‘threat cloud,’ so it can target the warhead.”
In tests, America’s midcourse interceptors only work about half the time. And those tests are done under perfect conditions against known threats. “After reviewing carefully the technology and test record of the [ground-based midcourse] system, the report concludes that its unreliability and vulnerability to countermeasures seriously limits its effectiveness,” the study said.
There’s still the terminal phase, that less than a second before a nuke hits its target. And the U.S. also has systems, like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THADD), designed to knock a missile out of the air during this crucial moment.
The truth is that if a nuke is that close, you’ve probably already lost. “Even effective terminal-phase defenses can defend only limited areas,” the study said. “Moreover, terminal-phase sensors are vulnerable to the blinding effects of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.”
These are just a few of the problems that the researchers discussed in the 60-page report. There are many more. And remember this is just talking about shooting down a North Korean salvo. Things get more complicated when you add Russia, China, or any of America’s other enemies.
For Cirincione, the report confirmed his long-held belief that any kind of intricate missile defense system isn’t worth the cost of building it. “In short, we cannot defend the country against a determined ballistic missile attack now or anytime in the foreseeable future,” he said. “While we can intercept short-range missiles such as those used in the Middle East or Ukraine, there is zero chance we can intercept long-range missiles that span the oceans. We have spent over $400 billion since 1983 on nothing. Future expenditures will just be throwing money down a rat hole.”
Moneymaker was bullish. “When a nation can get aligned around an objective, whether that’s Star Wars or Golden Dome or sending someone to the moon, when you have a unity of mission, a lot of things can happen,” he said.
He also noted that the Golden Dome was a massive opportunity for disruptive defense companies like Anduril and, yes, BlueHalo. He said that Golden Dome was a project at a scale that’s never been seen before. Building any proposed system will require cooperation between state and local officials, police, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the DHS. “There’s a lot of constituents at play that have a next-level order of integration that needs to happen.”
In Moneymaker’s imagining, the Golden Dome wouldn’t be just one system but a vast patchwork of weapons that cover the United States. “Is this one dome? Or is it a series of federated domes that interplay with each other? I just, just given the size and scale of the endeavor, we’re going to see phases to this development,” he said.
Moneymaker explained that high-value targets like military bases or large metro areas might get protection first and then be woven together into a “tapestry or fabric of protection.” He said the project is so big that progress will be incremental. “The good news is that I think we can go fast as a nation when we need to or want to.”
In Washington this week, there’s talk of creating a whole new department just to handle the development of the Golden Dome. Booz Allen Hamilton has teased a swarm of refrigerator-sized drones flying in 20 orbital planes around 200 miles in the air. The plan is for these AI-connected drone swarms to identify missiles as they come in and slam into them.
That’s just one of the many pitches the Trump administration has received. According to Defense One, the Pentagon has gotten more than 360 plans related to the Golden Dome. “I fully expect the Trump administration to ignore this serious scientific advice, just as they reject scientific truth on the climate crisis, vaccines, and the environment,” Cirincione said. “When there is money to be made, science is shunted aside.”
