May 21, 2025 - 9:30pm
President Donald Trump has authorised a highly ambitious and highly expensive “Golden Dome” missile defence system to better defend the United States from nuclear attack. Announcing the programme from the White House on Tuesday, Trump said it would cost $175 billion and be provisionally operational by the end of his term in office.
There is significant potential for an expensive boondoggle here. The Congressional Budget Office has assessed that the Golden Dome will cost between $500-$550 billion, easily more than twice Trump’s estimate. The Space Force’s commanding officer suggested last week that he agreed with that estimate. And the technology that this Dome will rely upon is far more complicated, unproven, and vastly greater in necessary scale than that which Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defence system relies upon.
Still, if the Golden Dome delivers on what the military wants it to do, it will provide a very important contribution to national defence. Underscoring that better potential, Canada is seeking to join the project.
The Golden Dome’s central focus will be on defeating nuclear-armed attacks against the US. This will involve integrating ground, air, and space-based detection and interdiction systems to destroy hostile ballistic and cruise missiles, or hypersonic vehicles carrying nuclear warheads. The aim is that Golden Dome can “kill” enemy weapons at any stage from prior to their launch to their final approach to a target.
The key ingredients of this system will be a constellation of existing and new satellites and space, air, sea, and land based sensors and interceptor weapons. Trump appeared to reference what seem to be highly classified US space-based strike capabilities when he observed on Tuesday that: “We’re the only ones that have this — we call it super technology.” These capabilities would potentially allow near-instantaneous space-based strikes on enemy missile launch platforms before those missiles could be launched.
Golden Dome also aims to provide anti-satellite capabilities to defeat Chinese and Russian satellite-based weapons that would attempt to destroy US satellites in the event of war. That matters because Russia is developing satellites armed with nuclear weapons which are designed to blind constellations of US satellites in single devastating strikes. Similarly, China is in the process of developing a constellation of thousands of satellites designed for anti-satellite warfare, including against civilian satellite networks such as Elon Musk’s Starlink. China and Russia want to be able to blind US military targeting systems, heavily disrupt civilian and military communications, and create political pressure on the US to agree to an early ceasefire in any war.
The key measure of Golden Dome’s success, then, will depend on whether this system is able to defeat a scaled enemy attack involving the simultaneous launch of hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles/vehicles. That’s a very big ask, especially in the context of rapidly developing hypersonic weapons technology that may soon outpace whatever defence systems that the Golden Dome will aim to provide. Russia and China will also increase their own space-based investments to counter this threat — risking an escalating arms race.
But if this programme can come in on or slightly over budget (another very big ask), and deliver heavy deterrence against an enemy’s employment of nuclear weapons, it will end up being an impressive feather in Trump’s legacy.
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