Nation Needs, Deserves Golden Dome's Global Coverage

We're Riding a Bumpy Road to Trump’s 'Golden Dome'

Efforts to build President Donald Trump’s Great Golden Dome are stumbling forward.

This is to be expected and the basis for this is based on the history of past efforts to defend Americans against ballistic missile attack.

Some challenge its technical feasibility; others challenge its cost even if it is possible; and still others oppose it as being "destabilizing."

This writer has watched and participated in this argument for over six decades, a span of time encompassing my work on Nike Hercules and Nike Zues, in the early 1960s at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

A decade later, I was working on the design criteria for deploying our first Safeguard (renamed from Nike Zues) site to protect our ICBMs.

With dismay, I read the transcript of the briefing by President Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, at the 1972 signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, limiting our strategic defenses.

He elaborated in troubling terms that this was good for us.

That view led me to try to better understand what the arms control community was all about . . . and eventually that led me to negotiate with the Soviets for five years, during which Kissinger told me that in 1972 he thought we could not compete with the Soviets.\

An appalling view.

I think Kissinger eventually changed his mind, but the ABM Treaty set us back for decades.

President George W. Bush withdrew from its terms in 2001.

But even he did not take full advantage of that freedom, as this writer argued in his May 7, 2001 Wall Street Journal article, "Why Not Space Based Missile Defense?", that restraint was likely due to opposition from the arms control community.

Now, I strongly support President Trump’s effort and believe we can begin deploying a space-based defense during his watch, if we revive the efforts Ronald Reagan began over three decades ago, and that I pursued under President George H.W. Bush.

But, ever since Reagan’s March 23,1983 speech launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the naysayers have chanted that such effective defenses could never be achieved and called his effort "Star Wars" to emphasize their view that seeking such protection was a fantasy.

But I know from 5-years negotiating with the Soviets on the Defense and Space issues that their “powers that be” then doubted such claims from our technical elite, especially given their own work, in some cases technically superior to ours.

That concern gave us enormous negotiating leverage, leading to the first ever arms control treaties to achieve major reductions in nuclear weapons.

The Soviets sought to strengthen the 1972 ABM Treaty, which they had repeatedly violated from its outset, but we only sought to enable our technologists to do their best without its long demonstrated ineffective protection.

Throughout those negotiations, the Soviets echoed claims of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which were not technically sound but reflected their long-standing belief that we would be safer if vulnerable and threatening massive retaliation should the Soviets attack us.

But I doubt that the Soviets ever believed that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) claim, but they sought to use it against us.

This UCS position echoed (and I expect still echoes) Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s 1967 position in the Glassboro, New Jersey summit between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin.

He argued that offensive missiles were fine but defenses against them were not . . . eventually the UCS called defenses destabilizing.

Ironically, that Defense Secretary actually laid the foundation of what later became the 1972 ABM Treaty banning all but vulnerable ballistic missile defenses then called Anti-Ballistic Missiles.

As this writer recalls, Kosygin said not to defend oneself was immoral.

I think he was right.

So did Reagan . . . and apparently so does Trump.

As the Soviet Union was crumbling in 1991, Britian’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told SDI technologists that she believed Reagan’s SDI convinced the Soviets that they could not compete. She also advised, "We should always keep our defenses sharp and our technology well ahead."

Advice to remember!

I have nothing against negotiations and have spent a major portion of my life doing just that. But I also want protection of all I hold dear by the best defense I can have, and I think they would be space-based, which is key to achieving global coverage.

I lament that many of the few who seem to take space-based defenses seriously raise exaggerated claims that such global defenses would be unaffordable.

From my point-of-view based on demonstrated evidence from three decades ago, the $25 Billion included in the recent House Reconciliation Bill should be sufficient to begin deploying space-based interceptors during President Trump’s term — and Aegis BMD already provides a limited global defense capability at sea and on a few ground-based sites.

The rest of Trump’s proposed $175 Billion should be focused on developing as quickly as possible space-based Directed Energy systems that can instantaneously engage "anything they see" at the speed of light.

Reagan was right, and Trump can assure both his and Reagan’s aspiration come true. We must stay the course on what no doubt will continue to be a bumpy road!

Henry F. Cooper, Ph.D. Is an engineer with a broad defense and national security career. He President Reagan's defense and space negotiator with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Director under President George H.W. Bush. Read Ambassador Cooper's Reports — More Here.