Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, which studies the US nuclear arsenal, stated that none of the current US or other countries’ missile defense systems are capable of countering Russian non-ballistic nuclear weapons.
According to him, the US initiative to create the Golden Dome system is technically unfeasible. Mello noted that Russia possesses weapons such as the Poseidon underwater drone, hypersonic missiles, and cruise missiles, which are specifically designed to overcome missile defense systems.
He emphasized that instead of fanciful projects like Golden Dome, real arms control measures are needed to ensure mutual security.
the Iron Dome, which is what trump wants to install (and calls the Golden Dome) was never meant to stop ICCBM missiles. It’s a system designed to catch the relatively short ranged rockets being used by Hamas and other missiles.
Trump is a moron.
To put the system into perspective, Israel has about 8,500 square miles of landmass. the US? 3.2 million.
Who’s lobbing short range missiles at USA?
Those damn Canadians!
The Mexicans obviously
Who is lobbing nukes?
It’s the same people. (No one.)
New cartel smuggling idea? /s
It’s actually so much worse than that, as the article explains.
Iron Dome was the inspiration, but with Golden Dome what they’re planning is space based interception. It’s Reagan’s Star Wars project back from the dead.
The problem with this is two fold; no known system in the world can reliably intercept ICBMs, and doing so from space is ludicrously expensive. It costs, in effect, about ten times as much to shoot down one ICBM as it does to build an launch one, meaning that a peer adversary can just build more missiles and flood the system. To stop even a Hundred ICBMs would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. China has six hundred.
Basically, like so much of what Trump spends money on, it will amount to a very expensive but completely useless toy.
600 known nuclear ICBMs. They can probably mass produce just the missiles to flood the system and let the actual nukes through.
They probably* don’t even have launch vehicles for the warheads they do have. That particular branch of their military isnextremely corrupt, with people selling everything they could off on the black market. Including, apparently, launch fuel.
I would find it surprising if they could mass produce them in any meaningful quantity.
(*not something I’m willing to bet on, to be clear. This is one of those plan for the worst case. The worst case is probably they sold off a portion of warheads to the highest bidder a la Sum of All Fears but the rest are all operational.)