One of Donald Trump’s less-examined projects since taking office last year is a vast new missile defence system to protect the United States from a strategic nuclear attack. For older anti-nuclear campaigners, it brought back memories of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) programme of the 1980s, famously dubbed ‘Star Wars’ almost from the day it was announced.
With his penchant for anything gold, Trump’s new version of SDI is the ‘Golden Dome for America’, which he intended to be operational before he leaves office in January 2029. That timetable has since slipped significantly, and like the SDI, its predicted cost of $175bn is expected to also go through the roof. More importantly still, it won’t even work.
The Golden Dome would involve a multitiered system with ground-based and space-based components that can identify, intercept and then destroy incoming missiles. Congress has so far approved an initial $24bn budget for the project, although an analysis by the non-partisan US Congressional Budget Office has since put the total cost at $1.2trn over 20 years.
Even that figure is likely an underestimate, according to non-government groups such as the US Physicians for Social Responsibility, which estimates the eventual cost to be three times that amount, at $3.6trn. Still, its report forecasts a defensive system that could not cope with a full-scale attack.
We’ve been here before. Despite absorbing billions of dollars and promising complete protection from attack, the SDI never amounted to much. A limited few interceptor missile systems survived that might have protected a couple of US cities while allowing the country itself, as well as the rest of the world, to experience massive destruction. This would then lead to a nuclear winter, as dense transnational clouds of debris, much of it radioactive, blotted out the sun for years.
Remember, though, that that was not the view of the powerful pro-nuclear lobby in the Reagan administration. Many of them actually believed a strategic nuclear war could be fought and won. Among them was Reagan’s deputy under secretary of defence, T K Jones, who put much faith in civil defence and famously said that Americans could survive by “digging a hole, covering it with a couple of doors and then throwing the dirt on top”. His view, as he told an interviewer in 1982, was that if there were “enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it”.
In the event and fortunately for everyone, by the end of the decade, the Cold War was easing. Many of the SDI programmes, such as the Airborne Laser, were eventually ditched, and the 1990s even saw a modest cutback in military spending before the post-2001 war on terror and the renewed surge in budgets.
Now, we are in an era of a new global nuclear arms race involving the nine nuclear powers: US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. All are working on new nuclear weapons and some, including China and the UK, are increasing the size of their arsenals.
The global nuclear arsenal currently runs to over 12,400 nuclear warheads, about 9,700 in military service and the rest in reserve, with around 90% held by the US and Russia. Although stockpiles are a lot smaller than the Cold War peak of 40 years ago, there is still a massive degree of “overkill”. Even a small attack of ten nuclear weapons on any country’s largest cities would kill millions and set it back decades, if not a century.
Moreover, much of the Golden Dome hardware will be in the form of satellite-based weapons, which will inevitably trigger an arms race in anti-satellite systems with all the uncertainties that this would entail.
If any of this is even remotely the case, it raises the question: What is the Golden Dome for? Part of the answer may again take us back to the SDI, when one function was to force the Soviet Union to overspend trying to keep up with the United States. It worked to an extent. Recognition of that was one reason why Mikhail Gorbachev shifted Soviet foreign policy away from aggressive nuclear arms expansion when he came to power in 1985.
Now, though, we have to look to China rather than Russia. Until a decade or so ago, China was certainly working on new nuclear weapons, but this was not being reflected in the size of its overall arsenal, which stood at around 400 nuclear warheads for years. That has now changed. China has rapidly expanded its nuclear stockpile to 600 or even 620 warheads and, at the current rate of expansion, will take it to a thousand by 2030, according to the Pentagon’s 2024 annual report.
Some of Trump’s advisers know full well that China is overtaking the United States in terms of economic power, but the US is still well ahead as a nuclear weapons state and is now pumping billions into missile defence. From a Chinese perspective, it may well see a need to develop its own ‘Golden Dome’ at considerable cost and diverting resources from the rest of its economy.
All this comes at a time of a huge expansion of world military budgets at great cost to other human endeavours. In this context, it is always worth recalling the view of that former military man, President Dwight D Eisenhower, back in 1953:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
