GOLDEN DOMEGolden Dome: What Trump Should Learn from Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ Missile Defense System Plan
Golden Dome is reportedly partly inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system that protects the country from missile attacks, but critics say that it’s much harder to design a defense system to protect a land mass the size of the United States. This is particularly the case in an era characterized by the threat from hypersonic missiles, as well as attacks from space.
Donald Trump has unveiled plans for a new “next-generation” missile defense system which he says will by “capable even of intercepting missiles launched from the other side of the world, or launched from space”. The US president says “Golden Dome”, which is reportedly partly inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system that protects the country from missile attacks, will be operational by the end of his current four-year term of office.
But critics say that it’s much harder to design a defense system to protect a land mass the size of the United States. This is particularly the case in an era characterized by the threat from hypersonic missiles, such as those used by Russia against Ukraine, as well as attacks from space.
Ever since the first aerial attacks on civilian populations, there have been increasing calls to provide systems that can defend and destroy the potential for an adversary to attack people, governments and infrastructure.
This developed from relatively basic defense systems, such as those employed by the UK from 1917 to protect London and the south-east of England from attack during the first world war, which developed further to provide a relatively large degree of protection during the Battle of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940.
During the cold war, which followed the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, research accelerated globally into ways of providing greater protection against nuclear attack. The most eye-catching of these ideas was the announcement by Ronald Reagan in 1983 of plans to develop a massive (and hugely expensive) land and space-based missile defense system.
The project, officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative quickly became known colloquially – if slightly mockingly – as “Star Wars”.
The concept behind the missile defense system was that it would provide a way of effectively making nuclear weapons obsolete. Through the application of a defensive system that incorporated both land and space-based missiles, it was believed that any nuclear warhead fired would be destroyed before it was able to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
This would not only prevent intercontinental ballistic missiles from striking their intended target, but their destruction so high above the Earth would mean that they would not pose a threat in terms of nuclear radiation and fallout.
