President Trump’s recent anouncement of his second administration’s intent to undertake the construction of an anti-missile defense system called the Golden Dome raises serious questions about its purpose, its costs, its feasibility, and its impact upon mutual assured deterrence and the potential for initiating strategic arms races with other nuclear powers.
This ambition is at least the fourth attempt to develop an impenetrable shield—or at least a near impervious defensive bulwark—against any offensive nuclear attack upon the United States. At an estimated overall price tag of $542 billion, this plan calls for the most serious reflection and searching appraisal by the Congress and the American people.
Previous efforts to devise such a missile defense system suggest that, despite expected advances in an array of technological areas, Trump’s Golden Dome is likely to be a sieve. That is, prior campaigns from 1955-1972, again in the early eighties, once more in 2001 all came to naught due to several insurmountable obstacles and conundrums.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF US ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE (ABM) PROJECTS
The earliest push to forge a defensive barrier to the threat of offensive nuclear weapons grew out of the politics of interservice rivalry beginning in the fifties. It resulted in the Army, not the Air Force, getting a piece of the highest strategic mission of the Department of Defense—ballistic missile defense.“Fantasies die hard ~ and often resurface under new conditions and in new guises”
As the ABM question became more entangled with domestic party politics and US-Russian relations, a technocratic Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, took control of further developing and deploying the Army’s anti-missile system. His underlying assumptions had major consequences for any decision about a defense shield.
However prepared McNamara was to undertake ABM research and development (R&D), even to the point of deploying a thin missile defense system (the Sentinel system), he remained committed to five strategic policy elements:
• The embrace of a strategic bias toward deterrence. That is, McNamara slowly abandoned the temptations of war-fighting and war-winning as the foundations of national security.
• A principled support for continued and unfettered military R&D. Despite his unwavering commitment to nuclear deterrence, he was amenable to use new Defense Department agencies, including the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), to explore the most arcane ideas for technologies that might erode the bulwark of superpower national security.
• An unflagging technological bias favoring offense over defense. Secretary McNamara created a weapons innovation process entailing that at least some US bombers and missiles must always get through to their targets.
• A military R&D framework that tied together and pitted offensive versus defensive weapons development in a kind of internal arms race fueling novel strategic ideas in US weapons laboratories. This process treated Soviet weapons innovations as secondary to the challenge/response battle between America’s own competing offensive and defensive weapons design teams.
• The necessity of pursuing vigorously arms control agreements to abate, redirect, and check the impulses of the strategic arms race. Because the route to a perfect defense proved to be folly, the perpetuation of mutual assured deterrence would never be surmounted. Hence, today the hope for a more peaceful world depends upon reducing the overkill capacities of existing nuclear arsenals.
Fortuitously, the McNamara legacy steered the Johnson and then the Nixon administrations through the rough waters of persisting US-Soviet tensions and antagonisms toward the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. As a result, a strategic race was tempered; wasted funding for a defense system that could not deliver a thick or thin shield was saved; and mutual assured deterrence was preserved.
FAST FORWARD
Fantasies die hard—and often resurface under new conditions and in new guises. President Ronald Reagan has been frequently dubbed the president who succeeded in embedding myths into an American political order that only now are being supplanted by the second Trump administration. With his inauguration of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—known in more popular terms as “Star Wars”— in March 23, 1983, Reagan challenged the strategic consensus generated by Secretary McNamara.
Soon the Soviets responded with new offensive weapons like multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, ground-hugging and radar-proof cruise missiles, and inexpensive decoys (e.g., chaff and fake warheads) designed to thwart strategic defense weapons.
Nevertheless, SDI was carried forward by the utopian hope that it would provide an impregnable, multi-tiered defense barrier that Reagan indicated might be shared with the Soviet Union. And – hallelujah! – mutual assured survival would replace the madness of mutual assured deterrence!“This fanciful hope, however, was opposed by defense experts… who considered such a complex thick system impossible”
This fanciful hope, however, was opposed by defense experts and Congressional “doves” who considered such a complex, thick system impossible. Moreover, skepticism of its feasibility was furthered by the emergence of new Soviet offensive technologies and easy, cheap countermeasures. These cast doubt on the US’s ever securing a “leakproof” defense umbrella for the country.
Eventually, the Soviet political liberalization occurring in the context of the START negotiations and the domestic reverberations of the growing popularity of the nuclear freeze movement contributed to the demise of support for “Star Wars” and its “shield of dreams.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites halted neither strategic arms talks nor the drive for a defense weapons system. This perpetuation became apparent with the coalescing of interest around some kind of anti-ballistic missile system from the George H. W. Bush to the George W. Bush administrations.
The former Bush government pinned its hopes on scattering thousands of kinetic energy interceptors to direct deadly beams and destroy enemy ICBMs in mid-flight. Dubbed “Brilliant Pebbles,” this concept was overwhelmed by other “blue skies” schemes hatched in the laboratories and planning board of defense planners and missile engineers. Yet the arms control fever of the time and escalating costs for these pebbles in space generated keen resistance, despite heavy marketing by the administration and its key defense exponents.
While President Clinton inherited support within the defense policy community, the tendency during his administration was to justify continued military R&D for an anti-missile defense but to resist mounting domestic political pressures to deploy any national missile defense system.
With the election of George W. Bush to the presidency, the political climate changed dramatically. On May 1, 2001, President Bush announced his decision to proceed with deploying a national defense system against rogue states and abrogate the 1972 ABM Treaty, if necessary.
The problem with this decision was that the exact architecture and configuration of the intended defense system remained unclear. As conceptualized by his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, its patchwork design seemed to borrow components from earlier ABM blueprints, amounting to a technological “Frankenstein monster.” Clearly, the Bush plan would be limited and not replace MAD as the keystone of US strategic policy. However, it would likely dismantle the arms control regime that had culminated in the US-Soviet ABM treaty and triggered START talks during the Reagan administration.
The shocking terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, however, raised new questions about the value of high-tech solutions for emerging low-tech dangers, effectively shifting the focus of national security policy to the incipient War on Terror.
EVALUATING TRUMP’S GOLDEN DOME
As the second Trump administration mobilizes popular support for the next chapter in pursuit of a ballistic missile defense for the United States, this retrospective on previous campaigns offers several sobering lessons for Americans:
1. It may be impossible to develop complicated offensive technologies and then layer on top of them a defensive shield that requires absolute perfection;
2. Pursuit of such a military enterprise will be extremely expensive. It would combine offensive and defensive weapons into an internal arms race that, as McNamara concluded, must ensure that some of the warheads always reach their targets;
3. A multi-layered ABM system will never overcome the less expensive countermeasures that other nations will develop to thwart the most sophisticated anti-missile system. Even the effort will require continually improving Golden Dome (with added expense) to handle these new offensive weapons;
4. This coordinated offensive-defensive R&D network will ignite new arms competitions among the United States, Russia, and China. This will heighten fears in other nuclear powers (including North Korea) and dramatically destabilize the international environment;
5. As the rising costs of the Golden Dome increase,its share of the defense budget will swallow up funding support for other national security and societal needs that are already being reduced to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and the corporate world.
The dreams (fantasies) of previous American presidents and their supporters for a leak-proof missile defense system have often appeared attractive and “technically sweet” because they offer a vision of total security against the ravages of nuclear war. And what could be better? But, as the current president and his Pentagon lieutenants and weapons design wizards press for its funding and eventual achievement, it is better to resist this temptation.
They would proceed down a road that has been traveled in the United States at least four times before with only these outcomes: undercutting strategic arms control efforts, worsening international tensions, and moving the Doomsday Clock ahead toward nuclear war. p. Trump’s Golden Dome is a defense industry boondoggle that will create a technological sieve yielding less security and perhaps economic ruin for this nation.
As America’s defense budget for the next fiscal year rises to an estimated $1.16 trillion, the folly of constructing any shield of dreams cannot be justified. It should be challenged in Congress, in the streets, and across print, television and radio, and social media. We need a new and renewed peace movement modeled after the freeze movement of old and fused with the sustainability movement of today.
Ernest J. Yanarella is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky and author of the book, The Missile Defense Controversy: Technology in Search of a Mission (University Press of Kentucky 1st and 2nd editions, 1977, 2001, reprinted 2013).
