A “shield” against nuclear attack makes nuclear war more likely
JUN 09, 2025
Donald Trump has a dream: a “golden dome” over America to defend the country against nuclear missiles. It’s a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s dream, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” after the movie. The problem is that the dream represents a nightmare.
How so? Golden Dome would be dangerously escalatory, wildly expensive, and unlikely to work as a “shield” to America. It is worse than a mistake: it is a crime. It represents a massive theft from those who hunger and suffer in America. As Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, wasting enormous resources on weapons systems is no way of life at all. It is humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. Crucifixion is not made more pleasant when the cross is golden.
Put differently, the Golden Dome is a golden idol, a false god, one that by making a massive nuclear strike more likely endangers all of us and God’s creation.
Golden Dome is a grotesque example of makework militarism and warfare as welfare for weapons makers. Though it’s unlikely to work, if it did (partially) it would make a massive nuclear strike more likely, not less, endangering the world with the ecocidal terror of nuclear winter.
Golden Dome and the so-called investment in America’s nuclear triad are both examples of socio-technological madness–America’s leaders are like the mutants in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” worshipping the bombs that twisted them and which can only destroy what’s left of civilization.
Some Christians today await the apocalypse when Christ is supposed to return–but the most likely apocalypse features not the second coming of a God-man but a third world war featuring bomb-gods of thermonuclear destruction.
As Daniel Ellsberg once noted, U.S. nuclear attack plans in the early 1960s envisioned 600 million killed, or 100 Holocausts (before we knew such an attack would lead to nuclear winter). We’re lucky this insanity never came to pass. The only sane policy is to cancel Golden Dome and end “investment” in a new nuclear triad. Disarmament, not rearmament, is what’s needed.
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The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space has released a statement against Golden Dome that you can read here. You can add your name to the statement, as I have. Here are some bullet points released along with the statement:
- Golden Dome is financially reckless and unsustainable. Early cost estimates range from $550 billion to several trillion dollars over two decades. This dwarfs even the Pentagon’s annual budget and adds to the US’s $37 trillion national debt—a price tag that makes the project fiscally indefensible.
- Experts overwhelmingly agree that 100% effective missile interception is a fantasy, especially against complex attacks involving decoys, hypersonic missiles, and maneuverable warheads. Even Israel’s Iron Dome has been bypassed by more rudimentary drone and missile attacks.
- Golden Dome includes space-based interceptors—effectively weaponizing the Earth’s orbit and triggering an arms race. This violates the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty and pushes nations like China and Russia to accelerate space weapons development.
- By giving the illusion of first-strike survivability, it runs counter to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine that has prevented so far a nuclear holocaust and incentivizes other powers to retain or expand their nuclear arsenals, blocking disarmament efforts permanently.
- Thousands of rocket launches for satellite interceptors would further damage the ozone layer, could generate dangerous orbital debris (Kessler Syndrome), and will harm our already fragile space environment.
- The only guaranteed winners of Golden Dome are weapons giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Palantir, which stand to profit enormously regardless of the system’s effectiveness or risks.
- The trillions funneled into Golden Dome could be used for urgent domestic priorities—such as healthcare, infrastructure, climate action, and education, directly benefiting millions of Americans.
In short, Golden Dome is a massive, dangerous, and futile vanity project, cloaked in patriotism but driven by profit, politics, and illusion.
Bracing Views 
The ABM treaty stopped an earlier attempt at the impossible task of exo-atmospheric ballistic missile defense. Both sides could see that lots of money would be spent pointlessly. That was long before the election of President Irrational and a “defense budget” that is a cornucopia for “defense” contractors.
Recall the counterattack on Israel by Iran where we saw video of the incoming missiles as they hit Tel Aviv. The media described these as “ballistic missiles”, but they were not. Ballistic missiles of the kind the US would need to stop (ICBM’s) could never be seen on a video as they arrive as warheads alone at thousands of miles an hour and have no exhaust signature as did the missiles hitting Tel Aviv. What we saw were cruise missiles coming in on a flat trajectory just as would manned aircraft at relatively slow speed, and yet Iron Dome could not stop them all.
Israel’s Iron Dome would be helpless against ballistic missiles, but it is effective against the slow by comparison missiles that have been launched from Gaza and Lebanon. Trump’s nonsense presentation claims Iron Dome as the penetration proof model for Golden Dome.
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Totally agree with you Clif. The “grifter is chief” is a con man which anyone with a smidgen of common sense could see if they chose to open their eyes.
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The arms race in the military technology of the day, the “dreadnought” battleship, pursued by both England and Germany, worked splendidly in deterring WWI. So that worked out well, as did the lasting legacy of that “conflict,” of such devastation theretofore unknown in human history as to be termed “The War to End All Wars.” How many have there been since 1918?
Even worse, but again drawing upon WWI, was – is – “‘War fever,’ which refers to the intense emotional excitement and fervor that swept through various nations in Europe at the onset of World War I, characterized by a wave of patriotic enthusiasm and support for military action.” So we have not only Trump’s enthusiasm for Golden Dome, and his address at West Point graduation ceremonies – “[W]e’re focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies and defending our great American flag like it has never been defended before” – but also Kamala Harris at the DNC in Chicago last year – “As Commander in Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
What was that quote from George Santayana about “those who cannot remember the past…,” which is paradoxically both relevant and irrelevant to an administration that has dismantled its Dept. of Education and has erased the centrality of Russia’s role in the defeat of the Nazis in “The Great Patriotic War”?
Golden Domes pursued by craniums filled with lead. Throw in the matchbook of Israel and we need not be concerned over who gets to write history in the future.
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