Kevin Eyer
The “Golden Dome Project,” announced by President Trump in May 2025, is advertised to be a multi-layer defense system for the United States, designed to safeguard the homeland from various aerial threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise weapons.
In other words, the President intends to render the United States impervious to air attack originating anywhere on the globe, from any enemy possessing any level of sophistication.
There is an allure to this, especially considering Israel’s remarkable anti-missile record over the past two years. Invulnerability to a missile attack? What could be more desirable, and what foolishness it would be to not achieve the timely completion such a wonderful thing. Here, finally, is the realization of the promise made by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, when he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
SDI was intended to protect the United States from attack by nuclear ballistic missiles, primarily from the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. “Star Wars,” as SDI was more commonly known, was to include space-based laser and particle beam weapons, sophisticated ground, and space-based sensors, and a new generation of ground-based, anti-missile missiles, featuring Kinetic Kill Vehicles (KKVs) that would maneuver, post-launch, to directly impact threat warheads. Ultimately, Star Wars broke apart on the rocks of the closing of the Cold War. As the threat of nuclear exchange diminished, the nation began to look for a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” and it quickly became plain that the cost of SDI was not only exorbitant, but that the technologies required to operationalize the system were far beyond the capability of the day.
Today, while global thermonuclear war seems far less of a threat than it did in 1983, it remains a ghastly possibility. Yet even if the desire to shield the nation from existential attack exists, the other issues that haunted SDI into an early grave remain. As was the case in the 1980s, the technology required to make the Golden Dome a reality is not nearly here, and much of that technology remains little more than theoretical. Moreover, even if the US should decide to shoulder the burdens necessary to mature the required technologies, the cost to field a capable system will certainly reach into the trillions.
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