As one who lived through the darkest days of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union had sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy each other many times over, along with the rest of the world, the key to keeping the peace was the knowledge that neither nation would survive the contest.
It was called the balance of terror, deterring the other guy from launching its ballistic missiles because it was understood you would be on the receiving end of same within 20 minutes.
Today, that deterrence is gone, leaving nuclear-armed terrorist nations such as Iran with the means of using low-flying hypersonic missiles to evade early-warning radars until minutes from impact.
As we consider Memorial Day and those who have defended our nation, President Donald Trump is now seeking to restore that strategic deterrence by ordering the creation of what he is calling “Golden Dome.” Essentially, it is a multi-layered defense system of anti-missile missiles, satellite surveillance networks, and AI computers that can react to threats within nanoseconds.
Such a defense system is enormously expensive.
But what price tag will you put on national survival in the face of nations such as North Korea, Iran, China and Russia that have developed super-fast low-flying ballistic missiles whose sole purpose is to surprise and destroy entire cities?
What is important to state is that with the myriad distractions this president faces, from the tariff tiffs with our trading partners to a Congress that needed to be corralled into a budget deal, Trump recognizes the existential threat America faces. His most recent decision to appoint Space Force General Michael Guetlein as head of the Golden Dome project has revealed to friend and foe alike that he is taking the lead in protecting our nation from the unthinkable.
By proceeding with Golden Dome, it returns our enemies to an era of uncertainty. They cannot be sure that a surprise hypersonic nuclear attack will succeed. It forces them to throw dice on their own survival. Or to paraphrase from a legendary movie, “Hey Kim Jong Un, are you feeling lucky?”
Trump’s strategic defense plan will also counter possible strategic blackmail, where rogue nations would use their missiles to try and coerce American policy decisions. A defensive shield would confront and defeat that kind of challenge
Spending dollars on Golden Dome will also strengthen our industrial and technology base, much the way the Apollo lunar project did during the 1960s.
There is little doubt that there are real challenges. From its complexity to its cost, these are factors that must be considered. But the credit must go to Trump, who has focused on what is America’s most important challenge in this century: national survival in the face of unprecedented military challenges from nuclear-armed foes. Those who have worn the uniform of our nation’s military would remind us all that failure is not an option.
{Reposted from Gatestone Institute}
