Why Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence shield is a dangerous idea

There is little chance of this project actually achieving its objective. It risks making the world a more dangerous place for everyone.

via Alamy/ 3BD6P3E

A friend once told me that the single easiest way to improve road safety would be to fit every car with a large, sharpened spike in the middle of the steering wheel. Knowing that any crash would almost certainly prove fatal to the person behind the wheel, my friend reasoned, would immediately turn everyone into extremely careful drivers.

A similar kind of logic was at the heart of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the USSR and the USA. The purpose was to limit the number of anti-ballistic missiles each superpower could possess. At first glance this may seem like a counter-intuitive move. Why would you want to restrict how many defensive missiles you can have, especially when those missiles could stop nuclear bombs from raining down on you and your country?

The people who drafted this treaty realised, however, that possessing such defensive capabilities would give the owners a false sense of security. It could make them more likely to start a nuclear war, as they would (wrongly) believe that they could survive the retaliatory strike. Mutually assured destruction only works as a deterrent if everyone feels vulnerable. What’s more, your opponents would simply build even more nuclear weapons to overcome your defences, leading to a dangerous arms race. Overall, the treaty was a masterpiece of logical thinking.

All of which made me shudder when I heard Donald Trump announce his plans for the “Golden Dome” missile defence shield last week. The system will cost a cool $175bn and, according to Trump, will be a “cutting edge missile defense shield to protect our homeland from the threat of foreign missile attack”. It’s hard to fault the heart or ambition of the plan - after all, which leader wouldn’t want to protect their country from a devastating attack? Yet the reality is that, aside from being hugely expensive and potentially of little practical use, it could actually make the world a more dangerous place for everyone.

For starters, there is little chance of this project actually achieving its objective. Even with recent advancements in technology, protecting a country the size of America from missile attack is virtually impossible. Israel’s Iron Dome, on which the proposed American system is loosely modelled (albeit with a Trumpian makeover) claims to have a 90% success rate in intercepting missiles.

This figure, however, is somewhat contested, as it is based on data provided by the Israeli military. Iron Dome also mainly intercepts low tech and comparatively short range conventional missiles it predicts will hit population centres. Trying to stop a wide range of high tech, modern ballistic and cruise missiles over a landmass which is nearly 500 times bigger than Israel feels like a Herculean task. This also doesn’t factor in the reality that building such a system will most likely push America’s rivals to build more advanced and harder-to-intercept missile systems of their own to defeat it.

Even if we use Israel’s Iron Done as benchmark and assume that Trump’s Golden Dome could stop 90% of incoming missiles, that’s 10% too many still getting through. Russia is believed to have over 1,700 nuclear warheads currently deployed. Even if 90% were successfully destroyed it would still mean 170 would hit the US, enough to wipe out almost every human on the continent.

Possessing this system could also lull American leaders into a false sense of security, making them more willing to take risks abroad. In recent years, Russia’s nuclear sabre-rattling over Ukraine made Biden wary to intervene more aggressively in the conflict. While many will argue that the US President should have taken a more muscular approach, it has at least stopped the conflict from escalating into a full-blown superpower confrontation. If a future President felt that the US was now immune to such threats - would they continue to take such a cautious approach?

This is not to say that having no domestic protection against such threats is a good idea. Cuts to defence budgets have left the UK without an effective shield in place, making our key military and civilian infrastructure vulnerable to an attack by conventional missiles. Nonetheless, building up limited capabilities to defend certain key sites is very different to attempting to develop a system to protect an entire country.

If Trump really wants to protect the US, the best thing he could do would be to engage other countries (and especially Russia) to mutually reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. While completely banning the bomb is both practically impossible and ultimately undesirable, an overall reduction of stockpiles could be achieved. This would reduce the risk of accidents and of these weapons ever falling into the wrong hands. If Trump could use his deal-making skills to achieve this then not only would he save the US government a fortune, but he would make the world a genuinely safer place for all. He might also find himself rightly receiving that Nobel Peace Prize he reportedly so desires.