"There is much to like about President Trump's idea for stronger nationwide protection against air and missile threats to the U.S. At present, the country's missile-defense system is based in Alaska and California and optimized to deal only with a North Korean threat.
This system likely wouldn't work against maneuvering hypersonic missiles, which numerous potential adversaries are developing. The U.S. also lacks a dedicated territorial defense against air-breathing threats such as cruise missiles and drones.
In his March address to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Trump invoked Ronald Reagan's 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, asserting that the U.S. now has the technology to do what Reagan could only dream about: develop a system in space and on Earth -- a "Golden Dome" -- to defend the country from a nuclear missile attack. This week in the Oval Office, the president doubled down on his assertion, and there's evidence to support it. Midrange "hit to kill" missile interceptors have had many successes on test ranges over the past decade.
There's another good reason to support Mr. Trump's aspiration: the frayed, maybe irreparably damaged, state of offensive nuclear arms control. Traditional bilateral limits on long-range nuclear delivery systems may no longer get the job done for two reasons.
First, America's New Start Treaty with Russia is already effectively suspended and due to expire next year. It's probably worth extending that treaty, but the state of relations with Moscow makes any such discussion difficult.
Second, China's dramatic increases in nuclear weaponry -- the Pentagon expects Beijing to have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, up from about 200 in 2020 -- mean there will soon be three nuclear superpowers, with China and Russia at least loosely aligned against the West.
Even combining British and French arsenals won't create parity in this new world order.
Rather than engage in an offensive arms competition against China and Russia, the U.S. should focus on defense.
This won't be simple. A huge missile-defense deployment could provoke Russia to expand its nuclear holdings. It had 30,000 warheads during the Cold War, five times as many as today, and it has the capacity to expand its arsenal again.
It's also very expensive to develop robust nationwide defense architecture. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that one possible defense system fitting Mr. Trump's description could cost more than $500 billion over 20 years.
One reason for the expense is that technology designed to provide protection against nuclear weapons must have a very high success rate -- meaning multiple layers of defenses, each providing multiple opportunities to down incoming nuclear warheads.
Another is that the space-based weapons that Mr. Trump is proposing have a basic problem: Even if we can figure out how to build them, the basic physics of orbital dynamics mean that most will be out of position to address a given threat at a given moment in time. Any laser or interceptor in low Earth orbit, where it would almost surely need to be located to be within lethal range of offensive warheads, will move across the sky in a predictable and periodic fashion. Adversaries could wait for interceptors to be on the other side of the Earth before launching an attack. A country might need dozens of defensive weapons in orbit to have a high enough likelihood that one will be in the right spot at the right time.
But enthusiasts for new missile-defense technology need not abandon hope. There are models of realistic, even affordable, nationwide missile-defense systems that could provide limited protection for the country, not only against North Korean ballistic missiles but against other dangers as well. In a future war over Taiwan, for instance, it would complicate China's calculus to threaten a nuclear attack against American military bases if it couldn't be sure the attack would get through. Nuclear weapons wouldn't become obsolete with such a deterrence-based defense, but the U.S. would be safer than it is today.
Some of this will require new technologies of the type the U.S. is already developing, including artificial intelligence, better space-based sensors and more-capable battle-management software. Mr. Trump should double down on these efforts. Systems such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system and the Navy's Aegis Combat System, which were originally designed to defend U.S. forces and allies from short- to medium-range missile threats, could be repositioned and expanded to combat long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles or submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well.
In other words, Mr. Trump's best option is to build on the capabilities of the current system in California and Alaska by developing an improvised missile-defense system. The first Bush administration had a similar concept in mind with its proposed Global Protection Against Limited Strikes system in 1991, which would have placed sensors and interceptors primarily along the periphery of the U.S. Its $87.5 billion price tag, in 1992 dollars, was eventually judged too costly given the technologies and threats of the day. But today's world is different, and that kind of cost may no longer be prohibitive.
If Mr. Trump tempers his Golden Dome vision and sets realistic goals, he has a chance to make lasting improvements to the nation's security.
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Mr. O'Hanlon holds a chair in defense and strategy at the Brookings Institution and is author of "Defense 101: Understanding the Military of Today and Tomorrow."” [1]
If someone were to create such a 100 percent effective nuclear defense system, it would be very tempting to use that system to safely conquer the world. A good answer to such a modern Alexander the Great would be to destroy all of the Earth's satellites. They are ideal targets above our heads. If they were destroyed, there would be no space sensors left, the system would become blind. Once a certain degree of destruction was reached, there would be so much debris that the exponentially increasing number of collisions would eliminate any chance of survival in near space.
1. A Realistic Path to Trump's 'Golden Dome'. O'Hanlon, Michael. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 May 2025: A15.
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