Impressed with the success of Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense against a attack by Iranian missiles and drones, President Trump has ordered the US war department to begin research on developing what he calls a ”Golden Dome” defense system like it to supposedly protect the entire US from a nuclear attack.
The problem is, the only reason Israel’s “Iron Dome” system worked as well as it did (and not perfectly), is that it was defending against slow-moving Iranian drones and short-range ballistic missiles that only move at speeds of well under 20,000 mph. A nuclear attack such as would be launched by Russia, China of even North Korea, would involve intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads arriving at speeds of 13-14,000 miles per hour.
Trump (a man so ignorant of science that during the Covid Pandemic he proposed curing people by having them drink bleach, shine ultra-violet light into their stomachs, and take Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine, not an anti-viral drug), was clearly unaware of and incurious about how the Israeli missile and drone system works.
The thing is, Israel’s vaunted ‘Iron Dome’ system doesn’t even try to knock down or destroy in flight every incoming. missile or drone. Rather, it uses sophisticated radar to plot the target of each incoming missile. If a projectile is heading for empty desert or is going to hit something that is unlikely to harm anyone on the ground, a defensive missile is not wasted on it. Ignoring those errant warheads allows the available defensive missiles to be devoted to missiles or drones that look like they represent genuine threats.
This strategy works because the relatively small chemical blasts from missiles that are allowed to pass are too small to do collateral damage. If they had been carrying nuclear warheads however, the damage and number of deaths caused by even wildly off-course delivery systems would be staggering. No nuclear tipped missiles can be ignored. Given that Russia, with over 2000 nukes mounted on missiles and China with 300 nuclear-tipped missiles, would in the event in any attack on the US, launch everything, under the “use ‘em or lose ‘em “logic” of nuclear war, and no current or imagined missile defense could knock even all of China’s ICBMs or close-to-ground level hypersonic missiles down.
Trump’s “Golden Dome” fantasy, like its White House promoter, is simply nuts.
Back in the 1980s Ronald Reagan excited his equally uneducated electoral base by ordering research into a Strategic Defense Initiative, inspired no doubt by his having watched the heroes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo of the early “Star Wars” films obliterating Darth Vader’s fleet of Tye-Fighters and their Death Star home base. The funding came from a pliant Congress, and he imagined project, if completed, would have cost over $750 billion according to Pentagon projections (which are always low-balled). But in the event, it was deemed to be unworkable, though not before tens of billions of dollars had been wasted on it. Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan was quietly dropped after the Pentagon had wasted $209 billion (back when a billion dollars was a lot of money!).
Trump’s idea would certainly cost vastly more in R&D, testing and construction costs than SDI, and would not work either, since evasive technologies to protect attackers are always easier to come up with than new defensive systems to defeat the evasive techniques.
Trump’s “Golden Dome” idea is the nuclear defense version of his Covid Pandemic defense idea of drinking bleach.
Come to think of it, maybe President Trump should just suggest that as a defense against possible nuclear attack, all Americans be supplied with a half gallon of household bleach for families to drink. That way, like the doomed survivors of nuclear war waiting for the cloud of deadly fallout to arrive in Australia in the cautionary 1957 Cold War novel On The Beach, who were each given a little pill to kill them so they wouldn’t have to die slow deaths from radiation poisoning, survivors of a future nuclear war cold end their lives quickly.
