nuclear-news

A Mar-a-Lago in the sky?

Meanwhile, as Trump is due to parade his military hardware through the streets and skies of Washington, DC this week, at a cost of $45 million to US taxpayers, we are told there is too much wasteful spending, so Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps must be slashed.

 June 8, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/06/08/a-mar-a-lago-in-the-sky/

US taxpayers are about to get golden fleeced, again, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

Last week we reported on the White House executive orders that would lay waste to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and put an end to any meaningful safety oversight of the US commercial nuclear sector.

Not that there was a whole lot to begin with. None of us will be standing outside the agency’s Rockville Maryland headquarters any time soon holding “Save the NRC” signs.

I mentioned last week that there were five orders affecting the nuclear sector. Technically, the fifth – Restoring Gold Standard Science — didn’t mention nuclear, but its overarching mission— to do the opposite of what its title says — will most certainly negatively affect the integrity of any evaluation of new reactor designs, with the stamp of approval given to the Department of Energy and even the Department of Defense, rather than the NRC.

The Gold Standard order served to remind us of Trump’s perennial obsession with everything gold and golden, also reflected, as it were, in his cheap bordello-style aesthetic on display at Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.

The wannabe king boasted during his January 20 inaugural address that “The Golden Age of America begins right now,” then reminded us six weeks later, during his March 4 Joint Address to Congress, that his Golden Age truly was coming. “Get ready for an incredible future,” he said. “The Golden Age of America has only just begun. It will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.”

That last part was certainly true.

As if all this golden fleecing of American taxpayers wasn’t enough, cue the next fanfare — but without any actual golden trumpeters — the Golden Dome for America!

“Golden Dome for America is a revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength,” asserts its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, our first clue that the Golden Dome has nothing whatever to do with peace, as Lockheed Martin is a major player in the US nuclear weapons complex.

The Golden Dome is effectively a reboot of Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative, mockingly nicknamed Star Wars, which was supposed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. That was just the latest failed iteration of a US missile defense concept that has been in the works since the 1950s. 

Reagan’s SDI arguably cost us a chance to rid the world of nuclear weapons altogether when in 1986, he and then Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev were poised to do just that. Gorbachev wanted Star Wars consigned to the laboratory. Reagan refused. The arms race continued.

Trump brags he has already picked out the architecture he likes for his Golden Dome, which makes you wonder whether he thinks it’s some sort of floating palace, a Mar-a-Lago in the sky?

The price tag for the Golden Dome is a whopping $175 billion (there’s austerity for you!) and apparently it will all be up and running before Trump’s term is out in January 2029, (assuming Trump willingly leaves office and we still have a democratic election process by then.)

That’s a timeline longtime national security and nuclear policy expert, Joe Cirincione, called “insane” in an interview with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “You probably won’t even get the architecture of the system settled by the end of his administration,” Cirincione said.

Even more insane is that, far from enhancing the safety of the US, the Golden Dome is entirely provocative and, as a nervous China has already warned, will only increase the risks of militarizing space and could even relaunch a global arms race (arguably something that is already underway).

 In any case, there’s not much use in a Golden Dome unless it’s one hundred percent effective, which it has a one hundred percent probability of not being. Its predecessor certainly didn’t achieve that and was what Cirincione described as “the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense.”

If just one missile does get through, the level of destruction would be devastating, and the US would then likely retaliate after which all bets are off.

So far, US missile defense interception attempts (fortunately all tests), have had a success rate that spans a range of 41% to 88% depending on whether you accept an independent analysis, which generates the lower number, or “official” tallies, which produce the higher one. Either way, it’s not 100%.

The whole sorry saga, which began with the deployment of the earliest iterations of US missile defense in 1962, has cost at least $531 billion to date, according to Stephen Schwartz, a longtime analyst on nuclear weapons costs.

On BlueSky, Schwartz called the Golden Dome project “delusional and reckless. There’s no way to design, test, construct, and deploy a comprehensive system to reliably stop any missiles launched from land, sea, or space, and do it in ‘two-and-a-half to three years’ for $175 billion.”

The White House counters that none of this matters as the Golden Dome is meant as a deterrent to frighten off aggressors. It’s the same flawed argument that says spending billions to have our own nuclear weapons is worth it because then our adversaries will never use theirs, either. This, of course, exposes the ludicrousness of the whole deterrence myth, since clearly we could achieve the same end if we all abolished our nuclear weapons, and save a whole lot of money to boot.

But if we proceed on the basis of the White House assertion, then it means we are about to spend $175 billion on something the US would never actually use.

The Golden Dome, it turns out, is no golden ticket to survival.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Any opinions are her own.

June 10, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war