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 ¡ª 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 Dome can¡¯t do extraordinary damage to strategic stability in the interim.
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