Not long after Donald Trump returned to the White House, he announced a grandiose and unrealistic plan, dubbed the “Golden Dome” national missile defense system, which he claims will be operational by the end of his term in office in 2028. Trump is resurrecting President Ronald Reagan’s failed “Star Wars” program, or Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, that envisaged a network of space-based lasers and missile interceptors that could shoot down Soviet Union missiles launched at U.S. cities. After spending billions of dollars, the technology was deemed unfeasible and the project was eventually scrapped.
Today, Trump’s plan will cost an estimated $175 billion to $542 billion over two decades. Although missile defense technology has improved over the past 40 years, so have cheap countermeasures adversaries could employ to overwhelm and knock out the U.S. system.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Mel Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, a former CIA analyst and author. Here he talks about his recent commentary, “The Waste and Futility of the Golden Dome National Defense System,” where he explains how a new, even unworkable U.S. missile defense system, will likely create instability among nuclear armed states, leading non-nuclear nations to build their own nuclear arsenals.
MICHAEL GOODMAN: There are three factors that have to be considered when you’re discussing national missile defense. One, it’s not workable and we know that from tests. I remember playing war games at the National War College and the assumption was that national missile defense wasn’t workable because no one has ever found a system despite all of the money thrown at research. And there’s still billions of dollars every year going into missile defense research. And I don’t think people know about that. It’s such a small part of the defense budget. There’s never been a system that could tell the difference between a decoy and an actual missile.
And if a country is good enough to launch a missile at an intercontinental range, and that’s what now North Korea is working on, developing chaff to fool the system and developing decoys would be no problem whatsoever. And even though the Pentagon likes to talk about the tests, there are successful tests, whenever I was involved in the National War College and did some work on this because I was also a intelligence adviser to the SALT I and ABM talks in Vienna in 1972, those tests were rigged.The system knew, could allow for what was a decoy and what was an actual missile. So it’s not workable. I don’t think it’s affordable. It’s going to drive out all sorts of spending, not only in the defense area, but outside of defense. And it’s totally unnecessary because I think what most countries, well the nuclear countries have realized that it’s a lot cheaper not to try to build a national missile defense, which is very expensive. You can easily overwhelm it with offensive missiles. And I think that’s what the Soviets decided. And now under Putin, that’s what the Russians have decided.
No one ever really talks about the strategic impact that this would have. In the past, it drew Russia and China closer together. This happened during the Reagan ’80s, but it’s much closer now in terms of their relationship. The European allies won’t be happy with this because they’ve always had this fear of decoupling, that the United States would always protect itself, but it would never protect Europe.
And if we had a national defense, particularly if we thought it worked, there would be that fear that we were decoupling from Europe. And when you have Donald Trump as a president who doesn’t have a lot of respect for Europe to begin with and has taken steps that suggested decoupling in other areas, particularly with regard to Ukraine, it’s already forced them to enter into their own arrangements, including nuclear discussions between Britain and France.
When I’ve written about this, I’ve also talked about how it would weaken the non-proliferation regime. If we’re going to go ahead and build a national missile defense, which I say is unworkable, it’s going to encourage other countries who have nuclear weapons to build more. And my fear is, and my concern would be that it may attract countries that have not shown a real interest in nuclear weapons, to go nuclear. At the top of my list would be a country like South Korea, which from time to time has talked about having nuclear weapons. Japan’s another possibility, even though I think their constitution as currently written, proscribes the idea of nuclear weapons.
SCOTT HARRIS: Mel, I did want to ask you, given the Golden Dome’s national missile defense systems’ limitations or the technical issues that will prevent it from working effectively to protect the U.S. from incoming missiles, why do it? There are certainly engineers and scientists who are advising the Pentagon, who know full well that cheap decoys will overwhelm a system no matter how sophisticated, as you pointed out. So why do this? Is this some kind of propaganda that Trump has dreamed up? I mean, this is not just Trump, I guess we should say. This is a long-running sort of stream of thought from Ronald Reagan all the way to today. But why do it?
MICHAEL GOODMAN: Well, I think the answer there — to go back to President Dwight David Eisenhower and his farewell address in 1961, is you have to factor in the military industrial conflicts. And when I think of the money that goes into missile defense, you’re talking about five major defense contractors, Raytheon, Boeing, TRW, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman. They give a lot of money to politicians, particularly to Republican politicians who support national missile defense. So the scientists and experts — and we have many of them, as you say, with excellent resumes — I don’t think it counts for very much because it’s the corporate influence and the money that corporations garner on the basis of our defense budget.
For more information, visit Mel Goodman’s website at melvingoodman.com, Center for International Policy at internationalpolicy.org, and Mel Goodman’s Counterpunch website articles.
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