President Trump’s Golden Dome: golden dream or black nightmare?

With great fanfare, the newly installed American President Donald Trump launched the idea of the United States creating an “Iron Dome” to protect America against aerial threats, similar to how the Iron Dome provides security to Israel. However, I find that the Golden Dome will bring the opposite of what the president thinks it will deliver.

From Iron Dome to Golden Dome

The name Iron Dome refers to the now famous and proven effective Israeli short-range air defense system. It has been deployed against numerous Qassam rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah. The relatively flat trajectory, low speed and low flight altitude of these rockets posed few challenges for the Iron Dome air defense system. The Qassams were generally effectively countered by the Iron Dome. Because Iron Dome interceptors only had to combat a limited set of targets (exclusively Qassam rockets), the Iron Dome effectors are relatively inexpensive (<$100,000) and offer good protection. Great effectiveness and considerable efficiency — Trump naturally wants that too!

Trump’s advisers will have since told him that the threat of this short range system and its rockets to the U.S. is virtually nil. America, after all, is not Israel in terms of size, geography and strategic environment. Who could actually threaten the U.S. with such a short range weapon system? Canada? Drug cartels in Mexico? 

Moreover, if you wanted to protect the entire U.S. against the specific threat the Iron Dome is built for, you would need an enormous number of these systems. More importantly, Iron Dome can only handle a limited set of targets and therefore offers little protection in that sense. Trump quickly renamed the project to Golden Dome. That also fits better with all the golden paraphernalia he has “embellished” the White House with. The memory of President Reagan’s SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the Star Wars project, is strongly evoked by this plan. This project died in 1993 when President Clinton pulled the plug. In his view, defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) could be achieved better and cheaper with ground-based air and missile defense.

With the Executive Order of May 20, 2025, Trump made $175 billion available for the development of the Golden Dome system, to protect the U.S. against the threat of an “enemy missile attack with intercontinental and hypersonic missiles, wherever they come from, even from space.” In his view, Canada can also benefit from this missile shield, for a payment of $61 billion.

Theoretical Background

Probably well known by the readers is the theoretical background of air and missile defense where it concerns ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. The three separate flight phases of such threats are: the boost phase in which a propulsion rocket brings the weapon up to speed and to great height (up to 1500 kilometers!). This is followed by the mid-course phase where missiles move towards their target, still outside the atmosphere which extends to about a 100 kilometer altitude. Finally, the terminal phase where ICBMs and hypersonic missiles fall towards the target at very high speed (Mach 10 or more), often vertically downwards. These ICBMs are now equipped with Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs). So, there is not just one, but up to ten targets to combat from one fired missile. These MIRVs are often deployed during the mid-course phase. 

Effective defense requires countering this threat during the (early) mid-course phase, and preferably before the MIRVs are deployed. Better yet to engage these types of missiles during the boost phase. During the boost phase, the MIRVs are not yet deployed, and the warhead(s) are still connected to the booster. Incidentally, during the boost phase, you probably don’t know who or what target the fired missile is aimed at, but that’s beside the point.

Logically, this early threat engagement requires acquiring intelligence about launches with Space-Based Infra-Red System (SBIRS) sensor-equipped satellites. It also requires the capability to carry out the combat of missile threats from space itself. And that is exactly what is also stated in that Executive Order: “space-based interceptors can also be part of the Golden Dome architecture…” The current idea is for a type of cocoon that orbits as satellites and can be activated if necessary, sometimes called satellite-pods. To achieve this, many such systems must orbit in a low Earth orbit. 

According to advisory firm Booz-Hamilton, a batch of 2,000 satellites would provide initial capability. The American Physical Society calculated that 16,000 such pods are required to neutralize, for example, 10 missiles launched in quick succession from North Korea. Incidentally, these satellite weapons do not yet exist, raising suspicion that many can be developed, tested, produced and launched in a short time, regardless of whether the $175 billion is sufficient budget for that, which I doubt. And all this while Trump is in a hurry. He wants Golden Dome to be operational before the end of his (current) presidency in 2029.

It will not make the U.S. any safer

It is obvious that the U.S. and the world will actually not become any safer through these plans. The stationing of these pods amounts to placing weapons in space. This jeopardizes the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which agreed that space is intended for peaceful use. It also states that no weapons of mass destruction may be placed in space. Unilateral arming of the space domain by the U.S. could lead to the entire Treaty collapsing, meaning that weapons of mass destruction would indeed be placed in space. In addition, a weapon placed in space, next to destroying ballistic and hypersonic missiles, can also be used to attack (other) targets on the Earth’s surface (or in space itself, thus a real space war!) and by this, pose a direct global threat. Such a development will not be tolerated by the strategic opponents of the U.S., and they will therefore take action against it. It could lead to Russia or China or North Korea choosing to preemptively station weapons in space themselves to combat the pods.

Conventional deterrence theories assume that the current system with mutual assured destruction, second-strike guarantees and weaknesses in defense, precisely contributes to mutual deterrence and hereby support (some kind of) stability. If the weakness of having gaps in air defense is removed totally as Golden Dome should do according to the White House, it changes the current balance and thus the strategic calculus for the world powers. China and Russia could build and deploy even more ballistic and hypersonic missiles, preemptively attack the U.S., and/or render this domain unusable for many years through a nuclear explosion in space (as Russian COSMOS 2553, a Russian satellite with a nuclear payload launched in February 2022,  might be able to conduct and as has been demonstrated by the U.S. in 1962 with Operation Starfish Prime). The latter, incidentally, would also have far-reaching consequences for our lives on Earth, for military personnel and certainly for civilians.

Conclusions on Golden Dome

The ancient Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, “Star Wars”) from the Reagan presidency appears to be being reanimated. Technologically and financially, that is a considerable challenge. Its effectiveness can furthermore be disputed, and whether America (and the world) will benefit much from it is also debatable. The development of the Golden Dome thus has quite a few objections:

• In my analysis, $175 billion is insufficient (there are estimates that say at least three times that amount is required for the next 10 years);
• In my analysis, it is questionable whether the system as conceived can actually be built;
• In my analysis, such a system can not be realized in a few years, as Trump wants;
• In my analysis, this system will not be truly effective, and;
• In my analysis, Golden Dome will not contribute to the safety of the U.S. (and the world) but exacerbate the global security situation as a whole..

My analysis is based on what we currently know about the project. As far as I’m concerned, the Golden Dome will therefore not prove to be a golden dream, but rather a black nightmare.

Patrick Bolder is a retired Lieutenant-Colonel from the Royal Netherlands Air Force with 40 years of service after graduating from the Royal Military Academy. He successfully graduated Higher Staff College in 2001 and NATO Defence College in 2015. He was stationed at policy departments at the Airstaff and Defence staff. He was deployed (twice) to the United States Security Coordinator mission in Ramallah, Palestine in 2012 and 2017 and was seconded to the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS), a geopolitical orientated thinktank until retirement in 2021. 

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