Calls for U.S. Iron Dome "a Fantasy"

Late yesterday President Trump issued an executive order mandating development of a hugely expensive, unrealistic and counterproductive homeland missile defense system. Comparisons to Israel’s Iron Dome are inaccurate and such a system has a low likelihood of success, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Below is a statement by Dr. Laura Grego, research director and senior scientist for the Global Security Program at UCS.

“President Trump’s vision of an Iron Dome over America is a fantasy. The apparent successes of Israel’s Iron Dome system are not relevant to US homeland defense. Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster than those Iron Dome is built for. Homeland missile defense requires an entirely different kind of defense, and because ICBMs carry nuclear-armed missiles, it needs to be very reliable and effective. Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked.

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat. A UCS-MIT technical analysis found that even a less-developed country such as North Korea could use long-understood countermeasures to fool midcourse defenses like the current homeland defense system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Proposals to get around those weaknesses by building space-based missile defenses have repeatedly been abandoned because they are expensive, very technically challenging, and readily defeated. Trump’s idea of a space-based missile defense is a bad investment.

“Longstanding US policy has been to focus on defense against a small number of missiles from a non-peer state like North Korea because trying to build a defense against the missile arsenals of an advanced state like Russia is technically unachievable, economically ruinous and strategically unwise. Russia and China already appear to be building new types of weapons with the purpose of defeating or avoiding missile defenses. Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the US safe from nuclear weapons.

“What President Trump gets absolutely right is that nuclear weapons present a catastrophic threat, and that as he said in Davos, nuclear disarmament is an urgent priority and is achievable. That is where the United States should be putting its efforts.”