The whole point of creating the Golden Dome over America is not to save it from nuclear attacks, it's to keep Donald Trump alive. If Trump ends wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the War Industry inventories slow to a crawl as gullible European fools build up their arsenals. The trillions of dollars the Golden Dome would eventually cost America should be enough to keep Deep State from murdering the President, but I'm sure the money could be put to some useful purpose.
‘Golden Dome’ is a national security
dead-end for Canada
Someone needs to say the quiet part out loud: President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defence system for North America is as dumb as a bag of hammers. It is contrary to our national interests, wasteful of the finite resources we have to spend on actual national defence, and undermines some of our most important, long-held beliefs about peace and security.
For starters, America’s now decades-long attempt to build a deployable ballistic missile defence (BMDs) system for “the homeland” has vaporized north of $400 billion with only a handful of dummy warhead interceptions to show for it. The successful tests that have occurred were engineered under controlled circumstances, with near-ideal weather conditions and featured none of the sophisticated counter-measures missile warheads currently use to avoid being shot down. There is zero evidence that a BMD system for Southern California, let alone the entirety of North America, is an achievable goal, full stop.
But what about Israel’s Iron Dome or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAD)? These are, after all, currently in service in both Ukraine and Israel and have proven effective against large-scale Russian and Iranian missile attacks.
The reality is the Iron Dome isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, the ideal basis for a continental missile defence system for America and Canada. The former is used to intercept slower-moving, shorter-range rockets (even artillery) and does an amazing job. The THAD and Israel’s Arrow anti-missile systems are generally characterized as “terminal” defences that hit single ballistic warheads as they fall back to earth and re-enter the atmosphere after having reached apogee.
This last point is critical. President Trump, the ultimate salesman, is promoting the “Golden Dome” as a comprehensive defence for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) not only from rogue nuclear states like North Korea and a possible future nuclear Iran but peer military powers like Russia and China.
Understandably, the president may have skipped the memo explaining that most ICBMs are equipped not with one warhead like the Russian Iskander or Iranian Fath but with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs). In effect, each missile contains multiple nuclear bombs, each able to self-maneuver (i.e. evade) as they fall back to Earth from outer space.
MIRVs, unlike missile interceptors, are a proven, multi-decade technology that has reached its pinnacle in doomsday rockets such as Russia’s Satan II. Capable of deploying up to 15 MIRVs from a single missile, the Satan II can deliver unimaginable payloads of upwards of 50 megatons or 3,000 Hiroshima bombs.
The world witnessed the first-ever demonstration of this terrifying technology in combat last year when Russia modified a nuclear intermediate-range ICBM to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with six hypersonic MIRVs (see the lightning-like strikes in the video below).
When our politicians champion the potential benefits of futuristic BMDs like President Trump’s “Golden Dome,” what they are really selling the public on is building space-based weapons. Highly theoretical, and utterly unproven, these “Star Wars” weapons are the only conceivable defence against today’s MIRV-ed ICBMs, which have to be intercepted just minutes after launch and before completing their final boost stage.
In short, if you support the “Golden Dome” in spite of its exorbitant cost (possibly up to $500 billion to block “one or two” ICBMs), its unproven technology, and the advanced warhead design of our hypothetical enemies, what one is really doing is buying into the idea that humankind should weaponize outer space.
Such an assumption runs directly contrary to the various, longstanding international treaties established to curb the militarization of space and to which Canada is a signatory. These included the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty (on banning nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere and outer space); the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (on principles governing state activities in the exploration and use of outer space, the Moon, and other celestial bodies); the 1968 Rescue Agreement (on the rescue of astronauts, return of astronauts, and return of objects launched into space); the 1972 Liability Convention (for damage caused by space objects) and half a dozen more.
Alas, our multidecade consensus to demilitarize outer space is breaking down with Russia, the U.S., China, and France all conducting in recent years space-based military exercises and testing Earth-orbit weapons systems.
Given this history and recent developments, how is it in our national interest to extend a “Golden Dome” over Canada, help finance it, and maybe most important of all, lend our credibility to the weaponization of outer space?
Will we be safer if the Chinese, Russians and other nuclear missile-capable states create even more sophisticated MRIVs and hypersonic missiles?
Is it more or less risky to live alongside an America that has both a first strike doctrine and the possibly false security of a “Golden Dome” missile defence?
What is our future as a species if we allow for the militarization of space and end once and for all the dream of leaving our hatreds behind on planet Earth?
There are many important areas where we can and should cooperate with the Americans on continental defence, from NORAD modernization to sovereignty patrols in the Arctic to border security and drug interdiction. But continent-wide, space-based missile defence isn’t one of them. Let’s, by all means, humour the president’s penchant for all things “golden,” but when the right time comes, Canada should take a hard pass on this national security dead end. It goes against our interests and more than half a century of principled opposition to the militarization of outer space.
Rudyard Griffiths is the publisher of The Hub.
No comments:
Post a Comment