The Golden Dome

The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I doubt that it comes as much of a surprise to members of Science for Peace that we are extremely skeptical with regard to Donald Trump’s suggestion of creating a missile shield to protect all of North America.   It is a thoroughly bad and indeed dangerous idea for a variety of reasons.   I will argue that the government of Canada should politely refuse to have any involvement with the project.   In making this recommendation I am fully aware of the difficulty of this approach, given the current tensions between Canada and the U.S. and the threats to our sovereignty that Mr. Trump has made repeatedly.  

What could possibly be wrong with a fundamentally defensive project like the Golden Dome and why wouldn’t Canada want to be under its umbrella?    The first thing that needs to be clearly understood, is that it is not in fact a defensive project at all.    To Understand why it is worth taking a brief detour back to the height of the Cold War and the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that was the basis of the strategic stability that (along with blind luck) saved humanity from self-destruction.  By the 1960’s both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had enough nuclear warheads to destroy every major city on the planet several times over.  (At their peak both had over 30,000 nuclear warheads in their arsenal.)   The logic behind this madness was that “deterrence” depended not on the total arsenal available to either side, but on their “second strike” capacity.   In other words, how many would remain after they had been subjected to a first strike.   As this number was hard to estimate, more was always better, a policy the manufacturers of these arms were only too happy to accept.   

Given the close calls, especially the Cuban missile crisis, by the late 60’s both sides recognized the need to stabilize this “balance of terror” resulting in a series of treaties, the most important of which was the “Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty”.   It reflected the understanding on both sides that the construction of a missile shield was in essence a “first strike” weapon.   Defending against a first strike of thousands of simultaneous incoming missiles was recognized as impossible but defending against the far smaller number of missiles the “enemy” may still have in their arsenal after having been struck first, was not.   Furthermore, if either or both sides developed such capacities, the only possible response would be to build ever more warheads in the hopes of overwhelming the system.  Dreams of strategic arms limitations, let alone reductions would be made impossible.   The treaty was in that sense a pre-requisite for the subsequent negotiations of SALT I & II, that in turn lead to the strategic arms reduction treaties that have brought the total arsenals of the U.S. to around 3000, Russia having slightly more.

This cooperation and mutual accommodation by the superpowers came to an end when the Carter administration shifted U.S. policy from “containment” to “rollback” (esp. in Afghanistan) but more profoundly with the Reagan administrations rhetoric of the “evil empire” and his announcement of the “Strategic Defence Initiative”, more commonly known as Star Wars.    An apparently clear violation of the ABM treaty, Reagan explained that the treaty prohibited the deployment of such a system, not research into creating the technologies that made it possible, and that if successful he would share it with the USSR to make everyone safer.   I won’t comment on the improbability of that suggestion.  Suffice it to note that the arms race did resume with some crediting it for bankrupting the USSR. The ABM treaty was, of course, unilaterally abandoned by the U.S. under the Bush Jr. administration.

What is also relevant in the current discussion is the chorus of scientist and experts that initially declared the project as technically impossible.   This consensus soon broke down as these same experts and the Universities that employed them became aware of the research funds likely coming their way.   Who cares if it ever works so long as the checks funding our research keep coming in.  Of course, the Cold War was long over before the DOD had even a single successful interception of a ballistic missile (one where the time of launch and trajectory was known in advance).

This is a dynamic that is already repeating itself with the huge cost estimates Trump is talking about.   Trump suggested a price tag of $175 billion for the whole package including ground and space based interceptors.   By contrast the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of only space based interceptors to exclusively protect against North Korean ICBM’s at $500 billion.  The true cost is almost certainly going to be even higher, if the pattern of previous defense projects, like the F-35 prevails. We can be certain that Lockheed-Martin… and the “think tanks” they fund, indeed the entire Military ,Industrial, Intelligence, Scientific, Media Complex will be enthusiastically on board.  The insistence that Canada pay $60 billion (?) of this, (again combined with a threat to Canada’s sovereignty by suggesting it would be free if Canada became the 51^st state) would be a subsidy to the U.S. military industrial base.

There has certainly been a lot of progress in the development of these technologies since, as demonstrated most recently both in Ukraine and Israel, but their limits have also been made more apparent in these conflicts.    In its recent conflict with Israel, Iran was able to overwhelm the “iron dome” upon which the “golden dome” project is based, with large numbers of projectiles and drones, the cost of which were a small fraction of the interceptors used to bring them down.   Iran also used a limited number of more sophisticated missiles that were able to penetrate Israel's air defense system.    The implication of this is that an attempt by the U.S. to protect itself with a missile shield would have the predictable result not of security but of a renewed arms race.   Rival states would immediately attempt to develop means of overwhelming or neutralizing the system.  Chinas, for example, might feel it has no choice but to abandon its “no first use” policy in favour of the launch on warning posture of Russia and the U.S..  The expenditure of massive resources into the dead end of arms while humanity is confronted with global environmental collapse would result.

The recent and ongoing conflict in the Middle East demonstrates another, perhaps even more important problem with this project.    The (perhaps misguided) faith the government of Israel had in the efficacy of the Iron Dome in protecting it from its regional adversaries gave it Carte Blanche to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and eventually Iran, without having to fear retaliation.    This again demonstrates that distinguishing offensive from defensive weapons systems is a fool’s errand as well as demonstrating the logic of the ABM treaty, discussed above.    Missile shields enable military aggression.

One of the most noticeable patterns in the history of U.S. foreign policy is what historians and political scientists refer to as the “militarization of U.S. foreign policy”.   Although the distrust of diplomacy by U.S. policy makers and their tendency toward unilateralism goes back to the days of George Washingtons warnings about the danger of “foreign entanglements”, it has become particularly pronounced since the end of the Cold War and the “unipolar moment”.   U.S. diplomacy is reserved for routine relations with allies not for resolving thorny issues with adversaries (other than as a delay tactic to prepare for military action).  The U.S. has consistently confronted issues that traditionally were dealt with through global cooperation and diplomacy, like terrorism, by military means.    It is a pattern Mr. Trump went out of his way to critique in his campaigns and denunciations of the political establishment in both parties.   The question we must ask ourselves is: will this tendency be enhanced or diminished if the U.S. is (or thinks that it is) invulnerable to attacks by its global adversaries?  The question answers itself.

To conclude, the “Golden Dome” project suffers from three key flaws that should convince the Government of Canada (and American voters and policy makers) to reject any participation in it.   It is fundamentally destabilizing and likely to provoke renewed and costly arms races that none of us can afford while trying to confront global emergencies like climate change.   It will be unable to overcome intractable technical problems and thus be ineffective.   Lastly, it will be unacceptably expensive.  

Humanities quest to achieve security through military power has for thousands of years failed to produce anything more than endless war.   Given the ever-rising destructiveness of the weapons involved, this quest has itself become an existential threat to the survival of our planet.   It is long overdue that the elites that dominate states around the world recognize the concept of “Common Security”, (fundamentally, that the security of one state cannot be achieved at the expense of the security of others) as the only hope for humanity.   This concept is already enshrined in the charter of the United Nations.  Lamentably the U.N. has essentially been sidelined in its core role of conflict resolution, not only in the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East but also in managing the relations between the U.S. and its perceived adversaries Russia and China.   Canada has a long history of support for multilateral institutions of conflict resolution and governance.   A renewed commitment to this tradition by our government is long overdue.

Arnd Jurgensen is Chair of the Nuclear Weapons Working Group and international relations specialist at University of Toronto.