Donald Trump remains a mystery man of some eerie sort. After all, just ask yourself, why in the world did he only recently announce that this country was going to immediately resume nuclear testing, not having tested a nuclear weapon despite its vast arsenal since 1992? Because of other countries testing programs, he wrote on (of course!) Truth Social, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Admittedly, such an idea has been in the air (if that's even the word for it) for months, but now the president has it on his increasingly strange mind, which is ominous indeed.
No matter, of course, that to use the only nuclear test site available would take at least a couple of years of preparation and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or that no other country has recently tested a nuclear weapon, or that a significant number of Democrats in Congress are lobbying for him to drop his dangerously provocative idea. When it comes to the destruction of this planet whether atomically or in climate-change fashion there's no question that Donald Trump is at the front of the classroom waving his hand like mad.
Of course, as TomDispatch regulars Bill Hartung and Ashley Gate point out today, he has long been wildly in favor of building a Golden Dome nuclear defense system that would prove a remarkable (and remarkably costly) boon for the corporations of what still passes as the defense industry, even if it would do nothing whatsoever for the rest of us. Let them fill you in on that nightmare project of our moment and the president who seems intent on recreating a nuclear arms race globally on a planet that already has enough problems to deal with. What a nightmare! Tom
Doomed, Not Domed?
The Wrath of the Con Man
By Ashley Gate and William D. Hartung
Kathryn Bigelow's new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, has been criticized by some experts for being unrealistic, most notably because it portrays an unlikely scenario in which an adversary chooses to attack the United States with just a single nuclear-armed missile. Such a move would, of course, leave the vast American nuclear arsenal largely intact and so invite a devastating response that would undoubtedly largely destroy the attackers nation. But the film is strikingly on target when it comes to one thing: its portrayal of the way one U.S. missile interceptor after another misses its target, despite the confidence of most American war planners that they would be able to destroy any incoming nuclear warhead and save the day.
At one point in the film, a junior official points out that U.S. interceptors have failed almost half their tests, and the secretary of defense responds by bellowing: That's what $50 billion buys us?
In fact, the situation is far worse than that. We taxpayers, whether we know it or not, are betting on a house of dynamite, gambling on the idea that technology will save us in the event of a nuclear attack. The United States has, in fact, spent more than $350 billion on missile defenses since, more than four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan promised to create a leak-proof defense against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Believe it or not, the Pentagon has yet to even conduct a realistic test of the system, which would involve attempting to intercept hundreds of warheads traveling at 1,500 miles per hour, surrounded by realistic decoys that would make it hard to even know which objects to target.
Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out that the dream of a perfect missile defense the very thing Donald Trump has promised that his cherished new Golden Dome system will be is a fantasy of the first order, and that missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for defending the United States from nuclear weapons.
Grego is hardly alone in her assessment. A March 2025 report by the American Physical Society found that creating a reliable and effective defense against even [a] small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs remains a daunting challenge. Its report also notes that few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective missile defense have been solved, and many of the hard problems we identified are likely to remain so during and probably beyond the 15-year time horizon envisioned in their study.
Despite the evidence that it will do next to nothing to defend us, President Trump remains all in on the Golden Dome project. Perhaps what he really has in mind, however, has little to do with actually defending us. So far, Golden Dome seems like a marketing concept designed to enrich arms contractors and burnish Trumps image rather than a carefully thought-out defense program.
Contrary to both logic and history, Trump has claimed that his supposedly leak-proof system can be produced in a mere three years for $175 billion. While that's a serious chunk of change, analysts in the field suggest that the cost is likely to be astronomically higher and that the presidents proposed timeline is, politely put, wildly optimistic. Todd Harrison, a respected Pentagon budget analyst currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, estimates that such a system would cost somewhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years, depending on its design. Harrison's high-end estimate is more than 20 times the off-hand price tossed out by President Trump.
As for the presidents proposed timeline of three years, its wildly out of line with the Pentagons experience with other major systems its developed. More than three decades after it was proposed as a possible next-generation fighter jet (under the moniker Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF), for example, the F-35, once touted as a revolution in military procurement, is still plagued by hundreds of defects, and the planes spend almost half their time in hangars for repair and maintenance.
Proponents of the Golden Dome project argue that its now feasible because of new technologies being developed in Silicon Valley, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. Those claims are, of course, unproven, and past experience suggests that there is no miracle technological solution to complex security threats. AI-driven weapons may be quicker to locate and destroy targets and capable of coordinating complex responses like swarms of drones. But there is no evidence that AI can help solve the problem of blocking hundreds of fast-flying warheads embedded in a cloud of decoys. Worse yet, a missile defense system needs to work perfectly each and every time if it is to provide leak-proof protection against a nuclear catastrophe, an inconceivable standard in the real world of weaponry and defensive systems.
Of course, the weapons contractors salivating at the prospect of a monstrous payday tied to the development of Golden Dome are well aware that the presidents timeline will be quite literally unmeetable. Lockheed Martin has optimistically suggested that it should be able to perform the first test of a space-based interceptor in 2028, three years from now. And such space-based interceptors have been suggested as a central element of the Golden Dome system. In other words, Trumps pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
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