Editors at National Review Online compare a new Trump administration plan to one that played a crucial role in ending the Cold War.
When, in March 1983 in a nationally televised speech, Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, he asked the American “scientific community” — “those who gave us nuclear weapons” — “to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” …
… Funny how that all turned out. Fully fledged ballistic missile defense technology (BMD) may not have been ripe in the ’80s, but not only did Reagan’s push to strengthen America’s defenses not lead to nuclear war between the superpowers, it arguably contributed to the end of the Cold War by forcing Soviet leadership to realize that they had no hope of outcompeting the West in technological prowess at the dawn of the Information Age.
Now, 40 years on, President Trump has issued an executive order mandating the development and deployment of an American “next-generation missile defense shield” designed “for the common defense” of “its citizens and the Nation.” Because the Trump White House entitled its executive order “Iron Dome for America,” there has been much guffawing and mockery, not very dissimilar to the Kennedy/Biden reaction four decades ago. New York Times reporter Matthew Bigg’s reaction was typical: “Experts immediately raised questions about whether an Iron Dome-style system was feasible for the United States, which is more than 400 times the size of Israel,” he wrote.
That misses the point, though. The “Iron Dome” moniker is more branding — as what everyone knows as a highly effective defense system — rather than the precise model of what Trump seeks to create. …
… What the United States needs — as the Trump executive order states — is a defense against “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” That’s a tall order, and it will require fully exploiting the opportunities presented by space.
