Speaker
Description
The Golden Dome promises to protect the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile attack, regardless of where they are launched or by whom, presenting national missile defense as a technological answer to the nuclear danger. This talk examines the gap between the political vision of Golden Dome and the technical, economic, and strategic realities of missile defense. An invincible shield that can protect the United States from nuclear war just as a “roof protects a family from rain,” is a captivating idea that survives despite many past failures. The pursuit of the United States of missile defense against nuclear weapons for over 80 years has produced no useful defense. This time is no different: space-based ballistic missile defense as envisioned by Golden Dome will not work because of well-understood technological and physical constraints. Even if deployed at enormous expense, such a system would remain vulnerable to countermeasures and salvo attacks, accelerating a nuclear arms race and eroding nuclear stability because of offense-defense cost imbalances. The result would be a highly complex and costly architecture with limited practical effectiveness. And while some degree of leakage may be tolerable in defending against conventional attack, in the case of a nuclear attack any leakage would have catastrophic consequences.