Nuclear Fool’s Gold

Will US President Donald Trump’s vision of building an impregnable missile-defense system be the final nail in the coffin for strategic nuclear arms control? Given that his proposed “Golden Dome” could trigger an expensive and destabilizing strategic arms race, Trump’s dream could be the world’s nightmare.

- Carl Bildt

At a minimum, Trump’s proposed system would represent a dangerous paradigm change. Through the final decades of the Cold War, and for another decade thereafter, dramatic reductions in nuclear arsenals led to strategic stability. Throughout this period of progress on arms control, peace was maintained through deterrence, which itself rested on the shared recognition of mutual assured destruction. This concept (appropriately abbreviated as MAD) was explicitly codified in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, according to which the United States and the Soviet Union agreed not to build any defensive shields against strategic nuclear strikes.

Despite the seeming recklessness of the concept, the persistent risk of a nuclear attack is widely seen to have prevented a nuclear exchange during the Cold War. MAD had made a direct conflict too dangerous to countenance. Neither side had any interest in allowing for a war that would guarantee its own destruction. Instead, the Cold War was waged on the margins, often through proxies. And though there were exceptionally dangerous moments - like the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when both the US and Soviet Union went on nuclear high alert — no direct violent confrontation ever took place.

Occasionally, political leaders would dream of alternative arrangements. US President Ronald Reagan, for example, envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, and launched the ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) to create a space-based missile-defense system. But the idea proved prohibitively expensive, and it probably never would have worked in practice.