It is easy chain reaction. You brake one satellite into two, the leftovers destroy two more satellites, and so on. A potential risk of the “Golden Dome” is that the near space will uncontrollably become a huge collection of pure junk because of all the military activity there.
"President Trump's "Golden Dome" plan has riled the three countries whose weapons technology poses the greatest threat to U.S. territory, with China, Russia and North Korea claiming the missile-defense project is driving a dangerous new arms race.
Trump wants a Golden Dome shield in place by the end of his term, which would combine ground-based interceptors with satellites to guard U.S. territory against high-tech threats, including hypersonic missiles.
The Chinese, North Koreans and Russians are all developing such missiles, as well as new weapons intended to evade U.S. defenses and combat the U.S. in outer space. The three are also increasingly helping each other militarily.
North Korea slammed the Golden Dome on Tuesday as the "largest arms-buildup plan in history." China and Russia this month called the project "deeply destabilizing." Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday the plan "represented a direct disruption to the foundations of strategic stability."
All three countries have also denounced Trump's call for space-based interceptors, saying they risk turning space into a battlefield.
Experts said a potential risk of the Golden Dome is that a comprehensive defensive system encourages a proliferation of missiles, including nuclear-capable weapons. It comes as a major nuclear treaty between Russia and the U.S. is set to expire next year.
"This missile-defense mirage gives you the illusion you can protect yourself, but you're driving all these countries to build all these hundreds and thousands of missiles so you end up in the worst of both worlds," said Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.
The U.S. said increasing threats make it necessary to build a more comprehensive missile-defense system and rejects criticism that the plan will militarize space.
"We have more recently observed China's satellites engaging in what can only be described as dogfighting maneuvers in space," said Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, the U.S. Space Force commander in the Indo-Pacific, on Tuesday. "These high-speed, combat-oriented operations on orbit serve as further evidence that Beijing is actively preparing to challenge the U.S. and our allies in space."
The Golden Dome plan represents a dramatic transformation in how the U.S. aims to confront such threats.
The U.S. said its missile defenses are directed at "rogue states," primarily North Korea, which aren't considered peer nuclear powers. Meanwhile, the U.S., Russia and China seek to prevent nuclear attack through deterrence.
Trump's Golden Dome plan implicitly recognizes that the arms-control era has passed and mutually assured destruction is no longer a sufficient deterrent to nuclear war.
A major emerging concern for U.S. defense is hypersonic weapons, which can travel at least five times the speed of sound, fly low and maneuver before hitting a target, making them difficult to detect, let alone intercept.
In the hypersonic race, the U.S. is behind. China, the leader, tested such a missile in 2021, which flew at speeds of more than 15,000 miles an hour as it circled the globe before striking a target in China.
In a sign of the Pentagon's progress, the U.S. military recently completed successful test flights of a reusable hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft.
When President Vladimir Putin introduced Russia's hypersonic weapons in 2018, an animated graphic showed a missile heading toward the West Coast of the U.S. "Missile-defense systems are useless against them, absolutely pointless," he said.
Russia's hypersonic weapons could potentially be stopped by a system such as the proposed Golden Dome because they travel at much slower speeds during initial launch and before hitting their target, leaving them susceptible to interceptors, said David Wright, a researcher at the Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Intercepting Russia's strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles could be much harder. At the first stage after launch, when a rocket pushes the missile up into -- and out of -- the atmosphere, an interceptor would have to be extremely close to respond to it in time. That would mean covering the territory across all of Russia's 11 time zones to intercept the missile in time, Podvig said. "You need to have a lot of them so that some of them are close enough to every launch point," he said.
North Korea has a missile with the range to potentially strike the U.S. -- and leader Kim Jong Un wants more long-range weapons that can fly farther, carry bigger payloads and be deployed more quickly.
The country is pursuing hypersonic technology, underwater nuclear-armed drones and tactical weaponry, although military experts said they aren't yet combat-ready.
The U.S. installed dozens of ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California beginning in the early 2000s, and has tested interceptors fired by the Aegis combat system to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, a system that was used successfully by Navy destroyers against Iranian weapons targeting Israel last year. Land-based versions of the system have been installed in Romania and Poland.
The U.S. also fields Patriot missile systems for shorter-range threats and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or Thaad, which is used for smaller areas including in South Korea and Guam.
Trump's goal of seeing his Golden Dome shield in place in little more than three years would be difficult to accomplish, military experts said.
Any missile-defense shield would likely only offer protection from about 85% of incoming missiles, Podvig said. That could promote a false sense of security, while also spurring rivals to produce more weapons, he said." [1]
1. Trump's 'Golden Dome' Riles Nuclear-Armed Foes. Austin Ramzy; Grove, Thomas; Martin, Timothy W. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 May 2025: A1.
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