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

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.

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.

(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

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.

Mecklin: I’m presuming that the opinion you shared with our readers a while back hasn’t really changed for you. So why don’t you quickly recap why you think this Golden Dome is a bad idea for our readers?

Cirincione: Sure. I think national missile defense is the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense. And what the Trump administration has now done is to revive an old, discredited idea, pump it full of new expectations, and market it as an instant fix to America’s vulnerability to ballistic missiles. This, of course, is nonsense.

Trump claims it’s only going to cost $175 billion, and it’ll be all done by the end of his term. Which is insane. You probably won’t even get the architecture of the system settled by the end of his administration.

Missile defense is an old idea that has been proven not to work, and it’s not for lack of effort. Ever since we deployed the first missile interceptors in 1962, we have spent over $531 billion on various failed missile-defense schemes. None have worked.

All we have to show for these decades of effort are 44 interceptors in Alaska and California that are so bad that the Department of Defense just awarded Lockheed Martin an $18 billion contract to build a brand-new replacement system. So none of this has worked.

Trump claims that Reagan didn’t have the missile-defense technology, but we now have “super technology.” That is simply not true. While there have been improvements in computers and miniaturization and lethality of kill vehicles, these are comparatively incremental considering the challenge that a defensive system faces. As the American Physical Society report concluded earlier this year, any conceivable missile defense system can be easily overwhelmed by an enemy firing a salvo of missiles instead of just one. And by deploying rudimentary countermeasures that can spoof the system’s sensors. And if you can’t see the warhead, you can’t hit it.

So I wouldn’t expect anything to come out of this program except for hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts.

Mecklin: Which brings up a name: Elon Musk.

Cirincione: In some ways, there is not much new to say about the technology, except to remind people that Trump’s press conference was lie upon lie upon lie. But what’s new here is the insiders who are getting a special advantage, and here the letter sent by 42 congressional Democrats to the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense is informative. They share their concerns with the inspector general that Elon Musk has unfairly influenced the system to gain an inside track on contracts for Golden Dome.

And they have reason to be concerned about this.

Musk has partnered with two other firms that are headed by Trump-supporting CEOs to lobby for the contract for the initial phase of this system, what’s called the custodial layer for the system, which would be thousands of sensor satellites—and perhaps then including hundreds or thousands of interceptor satellites. Musk’s SpaceX is already well positioned to compete on these contracts, because they are the biggest space launcher in the business. No matter who makes the satellites—probably some of the traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon—they will need someone to launch them, and that could very well be Elon Musk, who could launch hundreds of these satellites in the same way he’s launched thousands of Starlink satellites.

What concerns the members of Congress, however, is that he seems to have been being given special treatment by people in the Department of Defense who have even changed some of the rules for him. For example, Trump’s insistence on the rapid deployment of this system certainly benefits SpaceX, given the company’s existing launch capabilities.

So that letter—which I recommend to you and to your readers—is quite comprehensive in in laying out the ethical guidelines and, possibly, laws that Musk may have violated in pursuit of these contracts.

Musk didn’t invent the missile defense scam, but he’s about to get a lot richer by perpetuating it by claiming that there was a technological solution to the decades-old problem of nuclear armed ballistic missiles. There is not.

Mecklin: Let’s turn from seeming or possible corruption to strategic stability. What is Golden Dome going to do to strategic stability and arms control?

Cirincione: Any missile-defense system stimulates an offensive arms race because the easiest response of an adversary to a defense is to build more offensive weapons to overwhelm the defense. And that’s exactly what could happen here.

You see it already. One of the motivations behind China’s increase in ballistic missiles is their belief that the United States is aiming for a first-strike capability with new generations of offensive weapons, coupled with extensive spending on defensive systems. And even if independent scientists conclude that these defenses will not work, an adversary can’t count on that. The adversary has to assume that the system will work, and therefore it has to have enough offensive weapons to survive any attrition by defensive interceptors.

This understanding of the relationship between defensive and offensive nuclear weapons has been known for decades. That is why Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, when they negotiated the first treaty limiting nuclear weapons, SALT in 1972, coupled it with a treaty limiting defensive weapons, the anti-ballistic missile treaty (ABM). You can’t have one without the other. If you have an unregulated defensive arms race, you are going to stimulate an offensive arms race. So, ironically, trying to deploy a defensive system makes America weaker and less secure than simply doing nothing.

John Mecklin: I know you’re busy, and I’m going to wrap up with one final question. It seems to me it’s a real step-change to say we’re going to put missile interceptors in space. OK, they’re antimissile missiles, but they’re still missiles in space, right? That that seems to be really different and really dangerous. How do you see it?

Cirincione: There may be others you want to talk to about this, who are more expert on the space, but it’s absolutely true. We’re in a period where we’re watching the disintegration of the arms control regime built up over decades, and one of the mainstays of that regime has been the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits nuclear weapons in space.

We already suspect the Russians are working on a space-based nuclear system, but it will certainly encourage the Russians in that pursuit if the United States goes ahead with putting even non-nuclear weapons in space, because one of the easiest ways to wipe out those satellites is to use a nuclear weapon to blow a hole in the defensive constellations of satellites.

Even without nuclear weapons, this would be the first time that a country has placed active weapons in space—not sensors, not surveillance satellites, but armed satellites capable of shooting weapons down to Earth. We say we’re doing it to intercept enemy missiles, but those weapons could also be used to hit targets on Earth or other satellites. So this is a very troubling development.