MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
President Trump wants the Pentagon to take another look at missile defense. He wants to build something inspired by Israel's Iron Dome. But as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, that will be much more complex and expensive.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: In a speech to Congress earlier this year, President Trump laid out his plans for missile defense.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'm asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art Golden Dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland...
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TRUMP: ...All made in the USA.
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BRUMFIEL: Trump borrowed the name from an Israeli system known as Iron Dome, which has protected that country from rocket attacks for years.
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TRUMP: Israel has it, other places have it, and the United States should have it, too.
BRUMFIEL: But experts say building Golden Dome is going to be a lot more work than building Iron Dome.
JEFFREY LEWIS: It's the difference between a kayak and a battleship.
BRUMFIEL: Jeffrey Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey who looks at missile defenses. The first difference is the size of the land mass that needs to be protected. Israel is more than 400 times smaller than the U.S., and it's mostly flat desert that's easy to defend. Second, the U.S. and Israel are threatened by different kinds of missiles.
LEWIS: Iron Dome fundamentally is designed to deal with slow-moving, short-range projectiles.
BRUMFIEL: Missiles and rockets fired from near the border that can typically fly just tens of miles. Russia and China have missiles pointed at the U.S., but they are huge, powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles that soar into space and shriek back to Earth at hypersonic speeds. Iron Dome could never intercept them. In fact, these bigger missiles are hard for any existing missile defense system to intercept. Laura Grego is a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She says the best thing to do is to try and hit these ICBMs right as they're launching from their silos. But...
LAURA GREGO: The launch phase of those missiles really only lasts three to five minutes, so you only have, you know, some hundreds of seconds that you have available to catch them as they're launching.
BRUMFIEL: And this leads to the third big difference between the real Iron Dome and President Trump's futuristic Golden Dome - to hit these missiles early, a Golden Dome will likely need to include technology in space. The idea is to have satellites in orbit that could spot missiles as they leave the ground and then shoot them down at the beginning of their flight. It's an idea that's been thought of before. The problem, says Grego, is that the Earth is really big and satellites spin around it really fast, so...
GREGO: You need a lot of things in space in order to have them in the right place at the right time.
BRUMFIEL: Grego was part of an independent panel set up by the American Physical Society which took a look at missile defense. Earlier this year, they concluded...
GREGO: A constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to attempt to counter a rapid salvo of 10 solid-propellant ICBMs.
BRUMFIEL: The idea of having 16,000 satellites in orbit seemed impossible - until recently. Elon Musk's company SpaceX has been building a constellation of internet satellites called Starlink.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Ignition. Lift-off of the Falcon 9. Go SpaceX, go Starlink.
BRUMFIEL: It's put thousands of satellites into orbit, with plans to launch thousands more. Tom Karako is director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He says now is the time to take another look at space-based missile defenses.
TOM KARAKO: It's a welcome development, and it's in some respects overdue.
BRUMFIEL: Karako says the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine show why these missile defenses are needed. Non-nuclear missiles have become a go-to weapon, he says, and Golden Dome could serve as a powerful deterrent.
KARAKO: So I don't want to just deter a nuclear exchange. I want to deter a conventional war with China and Russia, and we do that by raising the threshold.
BRUMFIEL: The threshold for missile attacks of any kind - but Jeffrey Lewis is more skeptical. Conventional wars aside, Russia and China still depend on nuclear weapons to maintain a strategic balance with America. If we try and build a Golden Dome, he warns, they will rapidly expand and upgrade their nuclear arsenals in response.
LEWIS: We will end up with vastly larger Russian and Chinese nuclear forces. We will end up with the Russians and the Chinese having all kinds of crazy sci-fi weapons. In short, we will end up spending tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars to be in - at best - the same place we are today, and most likely a much worse place.
BRUMFIEL: Because it could spark a new nuclear arms race, and Russia may already be preparing. The U.S. believes it's experimenting with ways of putting nuclear weapons in space in order to destroy large constellations of satellites like the ones needed for Golden Dome. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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