Golden Dome spells doom for US taxpayers and world peace

The Golden Dome for America, announced with much grandiosity by the Trump White House and price tag $175 billion in taxpayer money, is just another reboot of a longstanding and failed missile defense program. Far from keeping Americans safe, it threatens to trigger another nuclear arms race and risks war in space. Prior iterations have had a lamentable intercept rate and if one nuclear missile gets through the Golden Dome, it will have been essentially useless.

The Golden Dome’s earlier iteration, Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative, mockingly nicknamed Star Wars, was supposed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. It never worked. Longtime national security expert, Joe Cirincione, calls missile defense “the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense.”

Reagan’s SDI arguably cost us a chance to rid the world of nuclear weapons altogether when in 1986, he and then Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev were poised to do just that. Gorbachev wanted Star Wars consigned to the laboratory. Reagan refused. The arms race continued.

So far, US missile defense interception attempts (fortunately all tests), have had a success rate that spans a range of 41% to 88% depending on whether you accept an independent analysis, which generates the lower number, or “official” tallies, which produce the higher one. Either way, it’s not 100%.

The whole sorry saga, which began with the deployment of the earliest iterations of US missile defense in 1962, has cost at least $531 billion to date, according to Stephen Schwartz, a longtime analyst on nuclear weapons costs.

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