Experts blast Trump’s US ‘iron dome’ ambitions saying it defies physics and practicality

Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health

Get our free Health Check email

Get our free Health Check email

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Last month, President Donald Trump directed the construction of an ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense shield to protect the U.S. from potential airborne attacks.

Named for Israel’s short-range missile defense system, the White House claims that the plan would “further the goal of peace through strength.”

“Over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems and their own homeland integrated air and missile defense capabilities,” Trump wrote in an executive order.

Since then, Republican lawmakers have introduced the IRON DOME Act, to improve the missile defense capabilities of the U.S.

But, experts say the plan for the “next-generation” shield flies in the face of reality.

open image in gallery

Part of the reasoning there is how Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system works. It protects the Middle Eastern nation from short-range rockets. In order to hit the U.S., countries would need to use longer range missiles, such as hypersonic and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Hypersonic missiles are nonnuclear offensive weapons that fly through the air faster than five times the speed of sound. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were first deployed by the U.S. in 1959, can fly faster than hypersonic missiles but aren’t as maneuverable.

Notably, hypersonic missile detection may be easier than detecting intercontinental ballistic missiles because they would give off tremendous heat as they hurdle through Earth’s atmosphere.

However, so would any decoys released alongside them, an op-ed in Scientific American pointed out on Tuesday. Hypersonic missiles fly on a flat trajectory, the publication notes, that would be difficult for U.S. ground-based interceptors - rockets launched to take out missiles - to catch their target.

“Most terrestrial-based radars cannot detect hypersonic weapons until late in the weapon’s flight due to line-of-sight limitations of radar detection,” the Congressional Research Service said in a recent report.

It’s the fear of these missiles, launched by U.S. adversaries, that is driving the push for the dome. The Trump administration’s order says it will guarantee the nation’s “second-strike capability” — though the op-ed notes hundreds are on submarines. The Navy’s existing fleet of ballistic submarines currently carries 54 percent of the nation’s nuclear deterrent arsenal.

open image in gallery

The cost of this system is estimated in trillions: more than the missiles they are meant to defend against.

Trump’s order comes amid massive cuts at critical government agencies. On Tuesday night, the president and billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that they aim to get $1 trillion dollars eliminated from the budget.

“Well, the — the overall goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit. And if we — if we — if the deficit is not brought under control, America will go bankrupt, “ Musk said.

But, what is lost in pursuit of these initiatives could be extremely harmful, Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama who now heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told The New York Times last month.

“The Iron Dome reference conjures up the success of the Israeli missile defense, but that’s misleading given the relatively short-range missiles that Israel defends against and the small territory it needs to defend,” he said.

“It’s completely implausible. First of all, Iron Dome is designed for short-range rockets. Projectiles that travel oh 40, 60, maybe 100 kilometers. It has no capability whatsoever against longer range missiles. And so, to try to duplicate that ... is ludicrous,” national security analyst Joseph Cirincione told ABC News’ Planet America last week.

“The Iron Dome defensive system defends about 45 square kilometers of space. You would need tens of thousands of Iron Dome systems at about $100 million apiece to defend the continental United States,” he added. “I tallied it up, it would cost about $2.5 trillion to try to do it that way, if it worked at all. But, of course, it doesn’t.”

Cirincione noted that America has spent $415 billion on missile systems and interceptors.

“None of them have worked against intercontinental ballistic missiles,” he said, noting that the missiles are much harder to hit than any systems Israel has encountered.