The 15-minute interview: Joe Cirincione on Golden Dome and the long-running US missile defense debacle

John Mecklin

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After President Trump announced the start of a so-called Golden Dome missile defense project early this week, major press coverage was largely matter-of-fact and relatively unperturbed. Some news reports included quotes from experts who questioned the administration’s estimates of the cost and time required to complete the enormously complex and ambitious project. But the administration’s basic assertions—that all of the United States could be protected against missile attack through a system of space-based sensing and attack satellites that could be completed before the end of Trump’s term in office at a cost of “only” $175 billion—were generally accorded a remarkable degree of deference, given the long history of extraordinarily expensive US missile defense failures.Joe Cirincione

To provide some historical depth and educated skepticism to the Golden Dome debate, I talked this week with Joe Cirincione, a longtime national security and nuclear policy analyst who has followed US missile defense efforts for decades. The need for serious and fundamental questioning of the Golden Dome project became clearer and clearer, the longer we talked.

John Mecklin: Have you seen any details of this Golden Dome proposal beyond what was in the executive order back in January?

Joe Cirincione: No, I haven’t seen any architecture that they claim to have selected. I haven’t seen any details on who’s getting the initial contracts. I watched the Oval Office event, but they’ve released surprisingly little information. I haven’t seen anything at the Defense Department website, either, and I was looking for it.

Mecklin: And that’s going to probably be a continuing problem, right? I mean, they’re going to claim all of this is classified, aren’t they?

Cirincione: Well, normally there’s a general presentation that’ll be done, a general architecture or general plan. I mean, that’s how it’s been done in the past anyway. So I would expect we’d have some cartoons that would be released, some PowerPoint slides. But there’s no indication of when that would be.