The national missile defense fantasy—again

National missile defense advocates live in a world of magic and make-believe. Fantasy replaces science, assertions replace facts, and cartoon weapons replace real capabilities.

This enduring fantasy, however, has real-world consequences.

President Donald Trump’s pledge last week to build “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland [with] space-based interceptors” has provoked a predictable reaction. Russia blasted Trump’s plan, detailed in his new executive order, “The Iron Dome for America.”

But no magic shield is going to protect the United States against nuclear attack.

An idea that never dies. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Friday of Trump’s plan that “it directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems.”

“We consider this as another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena of armed confrontation… and the deployment of weapons there,” Zakharova added.

The Russian reaction could scuttle Trump’s stated desire to negotiate limits on nuclear weapons. If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always trigger efforts to overcome them with more missiles and other counter-measures—the well-known security dilemma.

Despite all the formidable technical and geopolitical evidence against such schemes, however, “faith in national missile defense never dies,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot observes.

It is no coincidence that Trump’s new order is lifted almost entirely from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list. In the 1980s, the group championed President Ronald Reagan’s original dream to “put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate—a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain,” as he told a 1986 high school graduating class.

“Like Israel’s highly effective system of the same name, President Trump’s Iron Dome will provide an impenetrable defense for the American people that will bring peace through strength,” Heritage Foundation fellow Victoria Coates said. It “will fulfill President Reagan’s vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative laid out some four decades ago,” she added.

Doomed to fail. Trump’s executive order is a jumble of false claims and imaginary solutions. It begins by declaring that the risk of a missile attack “remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” That would surprise most experts on existential risks. The climate crisis, the threat of new pandemics, artificial intelligence, and crippling cyber attacks are all at least as likely catastrophic events as nuclear weapons delivered by other means. But threat inflation has always been a key part of efforts to justify urgent action and massive investment.

Trump claims that “over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex.” Despite being utter nonsense, this claim has gone largely unchallenged.

While it is true that new technologies have increased the lethality of missiles, the missile threat to the United States has decreased dramatically. Arms control treaties and the collapse of the Soviet Union slashed the number of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed missiles threatening the United States.

In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed 2,345 land-based and submarine-based missiles carrying over 9,300 nuclear warheads. That was the threat Reagan hoped to render “impotent and obsolete” with his missile shield.

Thanks to negotiated agreements, today’s Russia fields only 521 missiles, carrying 2,236 warheads. China’s land-based nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the United States have increased from around 20 in 1985 to some 135 today (carrying 238 warheads) and perhaps 72 single-warhead submarine-based missiles. In sum, the United States today faces roughly one-fifth the number of enemy missiles compared to 40 years ago and one-quarter of the nuclear warheads (728 vs. 2,365 missiles and 2,546 vs. 9,320 warheads). That is still a very dangerous threat but by no means a greater one.

Where arms control succeeded, missile defense technology failed.

None of the scores of systems developed by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its successor organizations have ever come close to providing the imaginary shield that Reagan promised. National missile defenses did not work then. They do not work now. They will likely never work.

Costly delirium. As Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat of Michigan, put it when chairing the extensive Government Operations Committee investigation into SDI in 1991, “Over the past eight years, the administration has been remarkably successful in convincing Congress to give it billions for SDI. But the program has proved remarkably unsuccessful in producing much of anything. SDI has pulled a reverse Rumpelstiltskin – it has spun gold into straw.”

I was Conyers’ chief congressional investigator for those hearings. I conducted oversight over SDI since the very first testimonies to Congress in 1984. Then, too, officials promised an impenetrable shield. They delivered boondoggles.

“Money was poured into these exotic weapons projects that were later abandoned,” Conyers said. “$1 billion for the Free Electron Laser. $1 billion for the Boost Surveillance and Tracking Satellite. $720 million for the Space-based Chemical Laser. $700 million for the Neutral Particle Beam. $366 million for the Airborne Optical Aircraft. The list goes on.”

To cover up these failures, Trump blames (as he does with everything from losing elections to fatal plane crashes) a deep conspiracy. He claims in his new order that Reagan’s program “was canceled before its goal could be realized.” Other presidents then handcuffed the US population by, still according to Trump’s executive order, limiting the effort “only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.”

Again, this is nonsense. As it became clear that the space-based laser weapons Edward Teller told Reagan he could build were a fantasy, Reagan and subsequent presidents scaled down the program to try to get some kind of workable defense. But after spending over $415 billion over decades, all the United States has to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that can hit a cooperative target in carefully scripted demonstrations—about half of the time. Congress currently allocates $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, most run by the SDI successor, the Missile Defense Agency.

Not an iron dome; more like an iron colander. The major technical problems that remain unresolved—and eventually forced the cancellation of all SDI’s ambitious plans—are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for more than 60 years:

• the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;
• the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;
• the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds or thousands of decoys;
• the problem of designing battle management, command, control, and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,
• the low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first—and, perhaps, only—time it is ever used.

These problems have been detailed at length already in the Bulletin’s columns, congressional reports, and independent expert studies, including two that played a major role in the Star Wars debates—the 1987 American Physical Society Directed Energy Weapon study and the 1988 Office of Technology Assessment Ballistic Missile Defense study.

These and other technical problems would have to be resolved before an effective missile defense system can be deployed. In the long term, new technologies, particularly directed energy weapons, hold some promise. In the short term, however, there is little reason for blind technological optimism.

Intentionally confusing the US public and gullible politicians by conflating the limited success of less-complicated defenses against short-range rockets with the infeasibility of destroying hundreds of long-range ballistic missiles is part of the sales effort.

“Israel has an Iron Dome. They have a missile defense system,” Trump promised at the Republican Party convention last year. “Why should other countries have this, and we don’t?”

Because it is technically impossible to build a system that can protect the United States from ballistic missile attack, Mr. President. No amount of hucksterism will change that.

“Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster,” missile defense expert Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists explains.

“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told Max Boot. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”

As shown repeatedly over the past 60 years, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear-armed missiles is to negotiate their elimination. Pretending that there is a magic shield that can be willed into existence will only make the problem of national missile defense worse.