Trump’s “Golden Dome” Won’t Work—but It’ll Make Elon Musk Richer

Musk understands that there is a lot of money to be made in missile defense. The program has grown from a relatively modest $3 billion a year, back when Ronald Reagan first started talking it up during the 1980s, to over $30 billion a year for “missile defense and defeat programs” today. Since the development of the first interceptors in 1962, the government has spent more than $531 billion on “multiple ineffective missile defense schemes,” according to Stephen Schwartz, a nuclear budget analyst. Over $453 billion of that was spent in failed efforts launched by Reagan in 1983 to fulfill his fantasy of a shield that could “protect us from ballistic missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain.”

All we have to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that are so flawed that the Pentagon last year awarded Lockheed Martin an $18 billion contract to build a brand-new replacement system. While missile defenses against short-range rockets, like those Hamas fired into Israel, can be effective, no country has built a system that can reliably shoot down nuclear missiles that travel thousands of miles at many times the speed of sound.

Trump claims that Reagan “didn’t have the technology,” but now we have “super technology” that will provide “close to 100 percent protection” against “hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles; all of them will be knocked out of the air.” Even better, said Trump, the whole thing will only cost $175 billion and be “fully operational before the end of my term.”