Inside Trump's Golden Dome: High Stakes Debate Over Missile Defense Shield

Golden Dome Paradigm

Since ordering the Pentagon in January to erect a U.S. missile defense shield partly based in space, President Donald Trump has claimed that it would be completed by the end of his term and cost $175 billion. His signature national security effort will have close to a 100 percent success rate, he has pledged, “forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland.”

But the White House and Pentagon have revealed scant details of the “Golden Dome” project, which defense and budget analysts say is likely to take at least a decade to complete and cost a trillion dollars or more.

Golden Dome would radically reshape military doctrine and further militarize space, an effort that’s been compared to the rush to build the atomic bomb during World War II and the Apollo moon landings. Yet it still may not come close to providing the kind of comprehensive protection Trump says it will.

Marking a historic break from decades of nuclear deterrence, it would either remedy a glaring vulnerability to the U.S. homeland or ignite an arms race in orbit that could last a generation or more.

Critics deride the most ambitious part of the program — flooding low Earth orbit with thousands of satellites to detect and take out adversaries’ missiles — as a fantasy that will only destabilize the fragile international order that has prevented nuclear war for more than 70 years.

“Golden Dome could be the single most dangerous idea Trump has ever proposed, and that’s saying something,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview.

President Donald Trump during an announcement of plans for the “Golden Dome” defense system on May 20, 2025. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Proponents counter that because of expanding threats, as well as dramatic technological advances, the time is right to resurrect the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” that fizzled out at the end of the Cold War. For years, defense hawks have pushed for a more robust missile-defense shield, citing the unsettling truth that the United States doesn’t have a comprehensive way to protect its homeland.

China and Russia, meanwhile, are already expanding their nuclear arsenals in the largest long-range weapons buildup since the Cold War. They are adding hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as new weapons systems, including hypersonic weapons designed to speed toward U.S. cities at more 4,000 mph, according to intelligence officials.

The United States has neglected its homeland missile defense systems, said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The $25 billion Trump dedicated to Golden Dome this year is a “down payment to blot out the years of inattention to this. We’ve known these threats are coming,” he said during a CSIS event. “It’s long overdue.”

’s Fort Greely and along California’s coast at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

If a missile attack were detected, the domes would crack open and out would shoot a multistage rocket, trailing a tail of fire. As it flew toward the target, satellites would continue to relay data — how fast the incoming missile is traveling, its altitude and trajectory, while radar stationed on the ground and at sea would do the same.

cal Society estimates that 16,000 interceptors would need to be stationed in orbit to take out an attack of 10 ICBMs.

“You need so many more interceptors than missiles, it becomes operationally impractical,” Harrison said.