In strategic defense, President Donald Trump has signaled three priorities. One week after his inauguration, he issued an executive order demanding a plan for a “next-generation missile defense shield.” His proposed “Golden Dome” would protect the US homeland against advanced aerial attack and ensure that the US could conduct retaliatory nuclear strikes. A second administration priority is the modernization of the US triad of land-, sea-, and air-launched nuclear weapons. At the same time, the President wants to hold nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China to reduce nuclear arsenals. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons; we already have so many,” he said in February. “One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’”
Are these three strategic priorities at odds? Some have argued that missile defense can accelerate the nuclear arms race. Moreover, there could appear to be a contradiction between modernizing and cutting nuclear arsenals, and between launching expensive strategic programs like missile defense while reducing spending.
But President Trump is not the first to simultaneously pursue homeland missile defense, military modernization, and arms control. More than 40 years ago, President Ronald Reagan similarly worked toward both missile defense and arms control, an effort that produced major reductions in nuclear weapons—even if it was less successful at missile defense. An examination of similarities and differences between today and the era of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative suggests that the parallel pursuit of missile defense, modernization, and arms control should not be dismissed, however unlikely complete success in all three may seem. Rather, they deserve careful study.
Reagan’s Competing Priorities
Much like President Trump’s vision for a Golden Dome, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative envisioned layered ballistic missile defenses, including lasers and space-based interceptors, to create a shield against nuclear attacks. This ambitious program—which was regarded by many to be ahead of available technology at the time—was projected to be a massive financial undertaking. Trump’s vision for Golden Dome is even more expansive, creating new challenges for missile defense architecture, and may have major implications for the allocation of defense spending across the Department of Defense and the broader US government.
In the 1980s, while the Strategic Defense Initiative project was beginning, the Reagan administration was simultaneously dealing with a conventional military modernization program that saw major increases in defense spending. Reagan's modernizing was not focused on nuclear forces, but he oversaw major increases in defense spending, from less than 5 percent of GDP to just over 6 percent of GDP by 1987.
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was a key but controversial part of this military buildup that elevated defense within US national deterrence strategy. Some allies and US critics saw it as inherently confrontational, contributing to the nuclear arms race and undermining arms control. But proponents credited Strategic Defense Initiative efforts with providing critical leverage to Reagan’s pursuit of peace through nuclear abolition, including the “bargaining chip theory” supported by Sen. Edward Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and other foreign policy experts.
Reagan’s dual approach of personal diplomacy and confrontation with the Soviet Union elevated the Strategic Defense Initiative despite real technological challenges to achieving its goals. Much of the real action was in research and development, which ultimately gained support from many US allies and spurred advances in technology. It also shifted the strategic debate on deterrence and missile defense, which continues to the current Golden Dome effort.
Today, the defense budget is smaller, in terms of GDP, and a modern ballistic missile defense shield would compete for budgetary space with the nuclear modernization effort and other governmental priorities, such as shipbuilding. However, some Senate Republicans are pursing significantly increased defense spending, to as much as 5 percent of GDP.
Arms Control and the Power of Relationships
As he was increasing spending on missile defense and military hardware, Reagan was also pursuing an aggressive arms control agenda with the Soviet Union that achieved major milestones. Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev successfully eliminated thousands of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe and paved the way for Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, to sign the START I treaty in 1991, limiting the US and Soviet Union each to 1,600 deployed strategic warheads.
Michael Krepon writes of Reagan’s dedication to the seemingly oppositional Strategic Defense Initiative and arms control priorities in his memoir, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace. He notes that Reagan’s presidential advisors were more involved in the details of negotiations, while the dire economic situation in the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s view of nuclear weapons as largely unnecessary contributed to arms control success during Reagan’s term. But he also argues that US presidents who have enjoyed good personal relationships with their counterparts have often achieved significant arms control agreements. Of Reagan and Gorbachev, he writes, “Their human bond was essential to break the back of the nuclear arms race.”
President Trump’s apparently amenable relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin would therefore count as a possible advantage for arms control negotiations. The administration’s transactional approach to international relations and the President’s prior personal relationships with his foreign counterparts may produce interesting agreements or frameworks. But he will likely have a more difficult time pursuing a buildup of military capabilities that could bring Russia—and especially China—to the negotiating table.
Reagan was much less successful in achieving the goals of the Strategic Defense Initiative. However, advances in technologies aligned to the Golden Dome effort may lead to more progress in that priority area than Reagan ever achieved. The revolution in commercial space launch is driving down the cost of sending payloads into orbit. And decades of research on intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles—from Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative through to parts of Israel’s Iron Dome architecture—make US interceptors today more efficient and accurate—and cheaper. Advances in emerging technology, from artificial intelligence to quantum sensors and directed energy, also make homeland missile defense much more possible in the 2020s than it was in the 1980s.
Critical Questions and the Research Agenda
Still, the concept of the Golden Dome is extraordinarily ambitious, even raising the question of whether it would require a Manhattan Project level of attention. It reinvigorates the debate on national defense strategy priorities at a moment when the shifting international security environment is more complicated than the Cold War Reagan inherited. Golden Dome will be competing with critical needs for nuclear modernization and rebuilding the US defense industrial base. It would need to integrate an unprecedented number of technologies and functions in networked systems. And as a shield, it is unlikely to cover the entirety of the United States, which is roughly 450 times larger than Iron Dome-protected Israel.
A number of critical questions will require careful analysis on the path to a Golden Dome, for example:
- What are the most challenging capability requirements for critical missile defense systems?
- How can the Pentagon avoid stalled progress on Golden Dome that plagued the Strategic Defense Initiative as well as more recent major defense projects?
- Can the US balance Golden Dome, nuclear modernization, and other priorities without more defense funding?
- Will force posture—particularly that of naval forces—need to change in order to prioritize missile defense of the homeland?
Such complex analytical questions will need be studied and tested empirically, so that leaders can make informed decisions about critical—even existential—issues that are currently being pursued at a rapid pace. Crafting a national defense strategy that supports all three of these administration priorities, spanning missile defense, nuclear modernization, and nuclear arms control, will be difficult. But it is not impossible.
