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silicon valley
Trump's Golden Dome Will Fail at Everything But Enriching Arms Contractors
Job number one in rolling back the Golden Dome boondoggle is simply making it clear that no missile defense system will protect us in the event of a nuclear attack.
Nov 17, 2025
Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, has been criticized by some experts for being unrealistic, most notably because it portrays an unlikely scenario in which an adversary chooses to attack the United States with just a single nuclear-armed missile. Such a move would, of course, leave the vast American nuclear arsenal largely intact and so invite a devastating response that would undoubtedly largely destroy the attacker’s nation. But the film is strikingly on target when it comes to one thing: its portrayal of the way one US missile interceptor after another misses its target, despite the confidence of most American war planners that they would be able to destroy any incoming nuclear warhead and save the day.
At one point in the film, a junior official points out that US interceptors have failed almost half their tests, and the secretary of defense responds by bellowing: “That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
In fact, the situation is far worse than that. We taxpayers, whether we know it or not, are betting on a house of dynamite, gambling on the idea that technology will save us in the event of a nuclear attack. The United States has, in fact, spent more than $350 billion on missile defenses since, more than four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan promised to create a leak-proof defense against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Believe it or not, the Pentagon has yet to even conduct a realistic test of the system, which would involve attempting to intercept hundreds of warheads traveling at 1,500 miles per hour, surrounded by realistic decoys that would make it hard to even know which objects to target.
Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out that the dream of a perfect missile defense—the very thing President Donald Trump has promised that his cherished new “Golden Dome” system will be—is a “fantasy” of the first order, and that “missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for defending the United States from nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
Grego is hardly alone in her assessment. A March 2025 report by the American Physical Society found that “creating a reliable and effective defense against even [a] small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs remains a daunting challenge.” Its report also notes that “few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective missile defense have been solved, and… many of the hard problems we identified are likely to remain so during and probably beyond” the 15-year time horizon envisioned in their study.
Despite the evidence that it will do next to nothing to defend us, President Trump remains all in on the Golden Dome project. Perhaps what he really has in mind, however, has little to do with actually defending us. So far, Golden Dome seems like a marketing concept designed to enrich arms contractors and burnish Trump’s image rather than a carefully thought-out defense program.
Contrary to both logic and history, Trump has claimed that his supposedly leak-proof system can be produced in a mere three years for $175 billion. While that’s a serious chunk of change, analysts in the field suggest that the cost is likely to be astronomically higher and that the president’s proposed timeline is, politely put, wildly optimistic. Todd Harrison, a respected Pentagon budget analyst currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, estimates that such a system would cost somewhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years, depending on its design. Harrison’s high-end estimate is more than 20 times the off-hand price tossed out by President Trump.
As for the president’s proposed timeline of three years, it’s wildly out of line with the Pentagon’s experience with other major systems it’s developed. More than three decades after it was proposed as a possible next-generation fighter jet (under the moniker Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF), for example, the F-35, once touted as a “revolution in military procurement,” is still plagued by hundreds of defects, and the planes spend almost half their time in hangars for repair and maintenance.
Proponents of the Golden Dome project argue that it’s now feasible because of new technologies being developed in Silicon Valley, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. Those claims are, of course, unproven, and past experience suggests that there is no miracle technological solution to complex security threats. AI-driven weapons may be quicker to locate and destroy targets and capable of coordinating complex responses like swarms of drones. But there is no evidence that AI can help solve the problem of blocking hundreds of fast-flying warheads embedded in a cloud of decoys. Worse yet, a missile defense system needs to work perfectly each and every time if it is to provide leak-proof protection against a nuclear catastrophe, an inconceivable standard in the real world of weaponry and defensive systems.
Of course, the weapons contractors salivating at the prospect of a monstrous payday tied to the development of Golden Dome are well aware that the president’s timeline will be quite literally unmeetable. Lockheed Martin has optimistically suggested that it should be able to perform the first test of a space-based interceptor in 2028, three years from now. And such space-based interceptors have been suggested as a central element of the Golden Dome system. In other words, Trump’s pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
Who Will Benefit from the Golden Dome?
The major contractors for Golden Dome may not be revealed for a few months, but we already know enough to be able to take an educated guess about which companies are likely to play central roles in the program.
The administration has said that Golden Dome will be built on existing hardware and the biggest current producers of missile defense hardware are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon (a major part of RTX Corporation). So, count on at least two of the three of them. Emerging military tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril have also been mentioned as possible system integrators. In other words, one or more of them would help coordinate development of the Golden Dome and provide detection and targeting software for it. The final choice for such an extremely lucrative role is less than certain, but as of now Anduril seems to have an inside track.
Even after the breakup of the Donald Trump-Elon Musk bromance, the tech industry still has a strong influence over the administration, starting with Vice President JD Vance. He was, after all, employed and mentored by Peter Thiel of Palantir, the godfather of the recent surge of military research and financing in Silicon Valley. Thiel was also a major donor to his successful 2022 Senate campaign, and Vance was charged with fundraising in Silicon Valley during the 2024 presidential campaign. Emerging military tech moguls like Thiel and Palmer Luckey, along with their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, view Vance as their man in the White House.
Should the Golden Dome system indeed be launched (at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer), its “gold” would further enrich already well-heeled weapons contractors, give us a false sense of security, and let Donald Trump pose as this country’s greatest defender ever.
Other military tech supporters in the Trump administration include Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, whose company, Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military contractors and is already pressing to reduce regulations on weapons firms in line with Silicon Valley’s wish list; Michael Obadal, a senior director at the military tech firm Anduril, who is now deputy secretary of the Army; Gregory Barbaccia, the former head of intelligence and investigations at Palantir, who is now the federal government’s chief information officer; Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg, a former executive at Palantir; and numerous key members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which took a wrecking ball to civilian bodies like the US Agency for International Development while sparing the Pentagon significant cuts.
Some analysts foresee a funding fight in the offing between those Silicon Valley military tech firms and the Big Five firms (Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX) that now dominate Pentagon contracting. But the Golden Dome project will have room for major players from both factions and may prove one area where the old guard and the Silicon Valley military tech crew join hands to lobby for maximum funding.
The nation’s premier defense firms and missile manufacturers will likely enjoy direct access to Golden Dome, since the project is expected to be headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, the “Pentagon of the South.” That self-described “Rocket City” houses the US Missile Defense Agency and a myriad of defense firms (including Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Boeing). It will also soon host the new Space Force headquarters.
While Huntsville has been a hub for missile defense since President Ronald Reagan’s failed ICBM defense efforts, what makes this placement particularly likely is the significance of Huntsville’s Republican representatives in Congress, particularly Rep. Dale Strong. “North Alabama has played a key role in every former and current US missile defense program and will undoubtedly be pivotal to the success of Golden Dome,” he explained, having received $337,600 in campaign contributions from the defense sector during the 2023-2024 election cycle and cofounded the House Golden Dome Caucus.
His advocacy for the project dovetails well with the power vested in House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (also from Alabama), who received $535,000 from the defense sector during the 2024 campaign. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Katie Boyd Britt, a member of the Senate Golden Dome Caucus, round out Alabama’s Republican Senate delegation.
Many of the leading boosters of the Golden Dome represent states like Alabama or districts that stand to benefit from the program. The bicameral congressional Golden Dome caucuses include numerous members from states already enmeshed in missile production, including North Dakota and Montana, which house ICBMs built and maintained by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, among other companies.
Those same weapons companies have long been donating generously to political campaigns. And only recently, to curry favor and prove themselves worthy of Golden Dome’s lucrative contracts, Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton joined Lockheed Martin in donating millions of dollars to President Trump’s new ballroom that is to replace the White House’s devastated East Wing. And expect further public displays of financial affection from arms companies awaiting the administration’s final verdict on Golden Dome contracts, which will likely be announced in early 2026.
The Gold of the Golden Dome
Golden Dome is already slated to receive nearly $40 billion in the next year when funds from President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” and the administration’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 are taken into account. The 2026 request for Golden Dome is more than twice the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, essential pillars of any effort to prevent new pandemics or address the challenges of the climate crisis. In addition, Golden Dome will undoubtedly siphon into the military sector significant numbers of scientists and engineers who might otherwise be trying to solve environmental and public health problems, undermining this country’s ability to deal with the greatest threats to our lives and livelihoods to fund a defense system that will never actually be able to defend us.
Worse yet, Golden Dome is likely to be more than just a waste of money. It could also accelerate the nuclear arms race between the US, Russia, and China. If, as is often the case, US adversaries prepare for worst-case scenarios, they are likely to make their plans based on the idea that Golden Dome just might work, which means they’ll increase their offensive forces to ensure that, in a nuclear confrontation, they are able to overwhelm any new missile defense network. It was precisely this sort of offensive-defensive arms race that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of the era of President Richard Nixon was designed to prevent. That agreement was, however, abandoned by President George W. Bush.
A no less dangerous aspect of any future involving the Golden Dome would be the creation of a new set of space-based interceptors as an integral part of the system. An interceptor in space may not actually be able to block a barrage of nuclear warheads, but it would definitely be capable of taking out civilian and military satellites, which travel in predictable orbits. If the unspoken agreement not to attack such satellites were ever to be lifted, basic functions of the global economy (not to speak of the US military) would be at risk. Not only could attacks on satellites bring the global economy to a grinding halt, but they could also spark a spiral of escalation that might, in the end, lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
Should the Golden Dome system indeed be launched (at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer), its “gold” would further enrich already well-heeled weapons contractors, give us a false sense of security, and let Donald Trump pose as this country’s greatest defender ever. Sadly, fantasies die hard, so job number one in rolling back the Golden Dome boondoggle is simply making it clear that no missile defense system will protect us in the event of a nuclear attack, a point made well by A House of Dynamite. The question is: Can our policymakers be as realistic in their assessment of missile defense as the makers of a major Hollywood movie? Or is that simply too much to ask?
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The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.
Aug 27, 2025
Sitting face to face on grey sofas, Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat continued another propaganda piece for the New York Times. Thiel is the billionaire owner and founder of Palantir, the world's largest private surveillance company, one of the biggest financiers of OpenAI and one of Silicon Valley's most influential ideologues. Douthat asked Thiel, "You would prefer the human race to endure, right?" After hesitating, Thiel replied, "I don't know." A glimpse of the impact of his response and the journalist's astonishment led him to amend his statement: "I, I would prefer, I would prefer." Would he, though?
Thiel is one of the main promoters of the archaic ideology that dominates the thinking of men such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Andreessen Horowitz, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. Although these tech moguls are presented as neutral or technology driven, reality is different. Their adaptation to the far-right is no longer surprising. The techlords have laid some of the cornerstones of authoritarian politics and provided the means for the rise of the new ideology of a return to the past.
So what do Thiel and the other techlords stand for? Their ideological base revolves around something called the "Dark Enlightenment", also known as the "Neo-Reactionary Movement." It is a mixture of libertarian doctrines with scientific racism, an anti-historical vision of a return to feudalism and an acceleration toward social and environmental collapse. According to Curtis Yarvin, another of its ideologues, this shadowy enlightenment is the formal recognition of the realities of existing power, aligning property rights with current political power and defending that "corporate power should become the organizing force in society." They seek to assert inequality not as an accident, but as a structure. For all practical purposes, the ideology of the techlords aims to overthrow any democratic illusion and install in its place a feudal division of territories, under which the supreme lords, technological monarchs, President-CEOs, the Techlords, would rule.
We can see what they aspire to in the most banal science fiction: a Star Wars world with a Supreme Emperor who rules the entire galaxy; a Dune world where noble houses dominate technologies, planets, resources and religions; or a Hunger Games world where, after a global rebellion, production has been forcibly distributed geographically and different peoples have to kill each other to entertain the elite. The ideology is so lazy that it has not evolved beyond the books that mostly teenagers read for entertainment during the holidays. The rejection of formal education, with these men abandoning university studies, so touted in the "self-made man" propaganda they peddle about themselves, has deprived them of essential information about history, biology, chemistry, physics, and other key areas of knowledge. The markets reward their audacious ignorance by offering praise and money in exchange for each usurpation. No wonder they think they are demigods and seek ideological rationalisations for their privilege. For the techlords, the reading of these works of popular science fiction culture is contrary to the instincts of people with a basic sense of justice. In Star Wars, they defend Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader; in The Hunger Games, the Capitol and President Snow.
Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right.
In a work such as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where eugenics runs through the narrative from all sides, the techlords seem to support the most perfidious position. Palantir, the company Peter Thiel created to surveil, steal data, and hand it over to authoritarian governments or whoever pays him, is a name taken from this fiction. Palantir is a crystal ball that reveals information, but is actually being used by the main villain, Sauron, to deceive and pervert wizards and kings, turning them against their territories and peoples. It would be difficult to interpret this name in any other way.
The ideology of the techlords is directly opposed to democracy, which they see as an obstacle to the accumulation and maintenance of wealth and power by the rich. They advocate corporate monarchies and authoritarian city-states controlled by themselves, praising Singapore as a model. To destroy democracy, they advocate dismantling the institutional apparatus of nation states, not because of any oppression or inequality, but to ensure that injustices have no social opposition and that, if opposition does arise, it can be strongly repressed. They advocate the removal of almost all public officials and services, increasing the numbers of the armed forces and police, building up the capacity for repression by the powers that be, no longer public, but corporate and business. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, combined with the expansion of a militia-style political police force such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a trial run of this. This month, the US government announced a $10 billion contract with Palantir to create a super database that aggregates information from all federal agencies and a platform to detect migratory movements in real time.
Another cornerstone of techlord ideology is accelerationism, which advocates the removal of all restrictions on capitalist growth and technological development, even if this leads to social and environmental collapse. As Zuckerberg said, "Move fast and break things." This idea does not differ fundamentally from neoliberal ideology but, unlike the latter, it does not hide the fact that social collapse is a goal of deregulation, rather than a side effect to be ignored or concealed. The removal of restrictions in accelerationism actually serves to create social breakdowns that allow the techlords to establish themselves as the new masters. Because they are accelerationists, they describe any opposition to their ideological infrastructure—social networks, "Artificial Intelligence," trips to Mars or outer space—as attacks on progress. This is the ideological strand that is trying to create a widespread feeling that the development of Large Language Models, touted as "Artificial Intelligence," is inevitable. There is no possibility that language models will not be biased and racist. Building on these and other prejudices, accelerationism argues that we must ignore the current suffering of billions of people in order to optimize technological developments that will create the environment in which future humans will colonize space. This suffering is destined for people other than the techlords, who are constantly building bunkers to hide in.
Added to the techlords' beliefs are other segments of science fiction, all of them anti-scientific: the imminent colonization of space, the physical fusion of humans with digital technology, the Singularity (the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence), and the childish idea that "Artificial Intelligence," Large Language Models, will solve all of humanity's problems. Authors such as Yuval Noah Harari and fields of "research" such as AI Safety are attempting to consolidate these ideas in popular culture and academia.
The science fiction in the minds of these billionaires, articulated with the orphaned leaders of the new fascist movements on the rise, has concrete and material effects. They are producing, in addition to suffering on a massive scale, a catastrophic waste of time and resources in the face of the greatest crisis in human history, the climate crisis. The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens. They lead a political movement that is rising today against the future of our entire species, seeking to subjugate all societies to a technological dystopia in which CEOs rule and behave like survivors of the apocalypse (and what is Elon Musk's reproductive frenzy if not his idea that he can be the warlord after the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, i.e., climate collapse, and repopulate the world and the galaxy as a new Adam?).
Techlords are not just dangerous. They are the ideological safe haven and unparalleled dissemination infrastructure for the new far-right. They already use "Artificial Intelligence" to impose their ideology on education, information, public services, justice, the arts, and every field they can usurp. They have set the traps, and we have been caught in them for a long time. The mainstream digital space is a straitjacket of complacency and a black hole of energy and ideas. Algorithms isolate us and deprive us of information that is useful for our collective life. The techlords and their ideology are mortal enemies of humanity and will stop at nothing to impose their dystopias in the coming years, trying to prevent us from stopping the collapse of all human civilisations. To make the digital space controlled by Meta, Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon a battlefield is to accept fighting underwater with our hands tied and weights on our feet. But it is in their arrogant ignorance that their vulnerabilities lie. These giants do indeed have feet of clay that must be knocked down, and their ideology is central to this: They despise material reality, reject the collective and the social as realities, and are submerged in fiction. Moving away from their preferred playing field, social media, may be one of the first steps toward their demise.
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Artificial Intelligence Is on a Collision Course With the Green Transition
The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.
Aug 23, 2025
The tech industry’s accelerating buildout of infrastructure to power artificial intelligence is rapidly turning an industry once lauded as “clean” and environmentally friendly into an air polluting, ecosystem destroying, water guzzling behemoth. Now, there’s an intensifying rift on the left about how to approach what was, until recently, a steadfast Democratic ally.
Progressives are now at a fork in the road with two very different options: a political reckoning with Silicon Valley or a rapprochement paid for with environmental havoc.
Some pundits and industry figures have counterintuitively argued that the proliferation of data centers to power AI is a good thing for the environment. The massive energy demand for training artificial intelligence will, in this telling, necessarily prompt a massive investment in clean energy and transmission infrastructure to meet that demand, thereby catalyzing a world-altering transition toward renewable energy. This argument, already suspect years ago, is entirely untenable now.
Following US President Donald Trump and company’s evisceration of the clean energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the narrow path of AI buildout being aligned with a green transition is now completely walled off. The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.
At present, there is simply no way to have the scale of AI buildout that the United States is seeing without terrible environmental downsides.
Even prior to Republicans torpedoing the IRA, AI electricity demand was growing faster than both renewable energy production and overall grid capacity. Without strong additionality regulations to require that new data centers be powered by the construction of new renewable energy generation, the AI boom will continue to increase consumption of fossil fuels.
Much of the increased energy demand was already being met by natural gas before the Republican spending package. It’s only going to get worse now. Without the clean energy tax credits, the advantages of incumbency that fossil fuels enjoy mean that the AI energy boom will further hook us on unsustainable resource consumption.
The firms building out AI infrastructure know this and often point to major investments in clean energy to protest characterizations of data centers as environmentally disastrous. But there are two major problems there. First, those investments may be in totally different locations than the actual data centers, meaning the centers are still consuming dirty energy. Second, and more importantly, at our present juncture in the climate crisis, we need to be actively decreasing our use of fossil fuels, not just containing increases in dirty energy production. (It’s worth noting that AI is also being used to enable more fossil fuel extraction.)
And the environmental destruction doesn’t stop there. The Trump White House recently moved to exempt data centers from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, paving the way for tech companies to despoil local environments without a second thought, and limiting opportunities for the public to gain information about data centers’ environmental impacts.
Perhaps nothing captures the excesses of AI quite so clearly as its water usage. Despite some pundits glibly claiming that there’s actually tons of water to go around, data centers threaten to worsen already dire droughts. We’re already beginning to see this in arid places like Chile and the American Southwest.
The Colorado River’s mismanagement is the stuff of public policy legend at this point. Aquifers across the Western US are being depleted. People were not mulling the idea of partially rerouting the Mississippi River for giggles. There is, unequivocally, a water crisis unfolding. And those data centers are very, very thirsty. A single data center can use millions of gallons a day.
There are already more than 90 data centers in the Phoenix area alone. That’s hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day. Protesting that “there’s plenty of water” is not just detached from the drought-stricken reality, it’s dangerous.
Data centers are being built in arid places intentionally; the low humidity reduces the risk of corrosion for the processor stacks warehoused there. Fresh water supplies, when depleted, are not easily renewed. Devoting more of it to cooling GPUs means less for drinking, irrigation, fighting wildfires, bathing, and other essential uses.
And there isn’t a way to bring water to the arid environments to mitigate that, either. Some people point to desalination, but that isn’t tenable for multiple reasons. To start, most of these data centers tend to be inland, as the sea air has similar corrosive effects as humidity. That, in turn, means that even accepting desalination as a cure for water scarcity, data centers would require transporting massive quantities of that purified water over significant distances, which would require complex energy-and resource-consuming engineering projects unlikely to proceed within the hurry up and go of our AI bubblish moment. (Desalination also has its own serious environmental harms.)
At present, there is simply no way to have the scale of AI buildout that the United States is seeing without terrible environmental downsides. The only choice left is whether to get out of Silicon Valley’s way or whether to slow the industry’s pace.
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