US president orders work on defence shield going beyond Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme that could trigger nuclear arms race
Donald Trump’s proposed system is comprehensive, extraordinarily expensive and a different order of technical sophistication from Israel’s Iron Dome. Photograph: iStockThe US president dubbed it the “Iron Dome for America” – a nod to Israel’s renowned air defence system.
Instead, Trump’s order demands the deployment of “space-based interceptors” – a web of satellites, some equipped with lasers. It then calls for the development of another layer of lower-altitude interceptors if the lasers fail. In part that is due to “thermal blooming”, whereby the energy from a laser heats up the atmosphere surrounding it and reduces the beam’s potency. Although the effect is small in the near vacuum of outer space, it is much greater once the beam hits Earth’s atmosphere.
Effective technologies already exist. Ukraine has successfully used western-supplied systems – such as US-made Patriots and the German-manufactured IRIS-T – to destroy incoming Russian ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Moreover, a 2000 technical analysis found that even a less-developed country such as North Korea could use long-understood countermeasures, such as decoys or a “cooled shroud” that covers the nuclear warhead to confound heat-seeking interceptor missiles.
“If one can show it can defend itself while also having first-strike capability , that is destabilising,” said Manpreet Sethi, head of the nuclear programme at the Centre for Air Power Studies in New Delhi. Analysts argued that a more sober approach would involve the US working to limit countries’ strategic nuclear arsenals – something Trump backed in a recent speech at Davos.
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