Featured Image Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Staff / Getty
News about President Donald Trump's Golden Dome is everywhere right now, with the 47th President of the United States unveiling his grand plans for a massive defense system that's evolved from the idea of Ronald Reagan's unrealized Strategic Defense Initiative (better known as the Star Wars Program).
The idea of covering the USA in a metaphorical dome that can detect and bring down missiles is a big deal, but as well as critics saying it's the 'dumbest idea in American history', there are further concerns that Donald Trump has massively underestimated the true cost of what it will take to put it into action.
The POTUS started the wheels in motion for his Golden Dome as soon as he started his second term in January 2025, and with hopes it'll be completed before the end of his presidency, things could start moving pretty rapidly.
Although Trump has claimed this will be the 'best system in the world' and boasted "the success rate is very close to 100 per cent," experts suggest it's not the failsafe it's being touted as.
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As reported in Scientific American, nuclear arms expert Jeffrey Lewis remains unconvinced.
For a start, the Golden Dome is loosely based on Israel's Iron Dome, that's been in operation since 2011. The problem is that Israel is geographically 400 times smaller than the USA, meaning protecting one of the world's biggest countries is a very different endeavour.
Trump has noted that, unlike the Iron Dome's ground-based systems, the Golden Dome will "deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors."
Lewis notes that Reagan's Star Wars Program fell apart because it was simply too hard to put the number of satellites needed up there, whereas SpaceX's Starlink constellation has already put thousands in space.
Addressing the elephant in the room about Russia's potentially putting space-based nukes in the cosmos, Lewis continued about how these could easily take apart the Golden Dome: "You put a high-yield nuclear weapon on a booster, and the split second it gets above the clouds, sure, you might see it—but now it sees you, too, before you can shoot.
"All it has to do at that point is detonate to blow a giant hole in your defenses, and that’s game over. And by the way, this rosy scenario assumes your adversaries don’t interfere with all your satellites passing over their territory in peacetime."
If not being able to defend against nukes wasn't bad enough, the upkeep alone could make the Golden Dome an unfeasible idea.
Lewis says that Starlink satellites have a three-to-five year lifespan, and if the network is made up of 10,000 satellites, you'll be replacing 2,000 every year...at a minimum. Even if the Trump administration can get them really cheap (say $20 million each), the replacement costs alone would be $40 billion a year.
In terms of the nuclear aspect, Lewis reiterates how the Golden Dome is likely a deterrent that we've seen time and time again over the likes of the Cold War. Ultimately, Lewis suggests, "This will be a gigantic waste of money that collapses under its own weight."
He thinks the USA will put a few interceptors up there and eventually get a hit to justify the Golden Dome. Ultimately, this will lead to an even more expensive war where the likes of China and Russia will try to find ways to take out the satellites.
He concludes that an arms race in space means the Golden Dome "is probably going to make everyone’s life a little bit more dangerous—at least until we, hopefully, come to our senses and decide to try something different."
