Front Burner - Is Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ more fantasy than reality?

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Donald Trump’s 'Golden Dome’ is a proposed defense program that will feature the use of space lasers, satellites and interceptors designed to provide 24/7 space based defence. It’s advertised as a bulwark against missiles and nuclear attacks from the likes of China, North Korea and Russia. Mike Stone is a Reuters reporter covering the U.S. arms trade and defense industry and joins the show to discuss Donald Trump’s trillion dollar sci-fi inspired project, Canada’s potential involvement, and its implications for the global arms race. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

There are two kinds of people in the world. Backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans 15 minutes from now and 15 years from now. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1,000 steps ahead. And when you're a forward thinker, you need a platform that thinks like you do. Workday's AI illuminates decision-making and reimagines how you manage your people and money for long-term success. Workday, moving business forever forward. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Elaine Chao, in for Jamie Poisson. Fanning into space, a layered defense to protect the country from nuclear devastation.

U.S. spy satellites would watch the world below, detect Soviet missiles blasting off, compute the position and speed of each missile, alert battle stations in space on Earth. What you're hearing right now isn't from an 80s sci-fi film. It's an animated explainer of a real Cold War-era defense project by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Reagan's billion-dollar strategic defense initiative, nicknamed the Star Wars Project, involved space lasers, satellites, and ground-based interceptors in a bid to protect the U.S. from Soviet ballistic missiles. Canada was invited to take part in 1985, but declined. Now, more than 40 years later,

U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his own project to defend the U.S. from missiles and nuclear attacks, from threats the Pentagon says could come from the likes of China, Russia Russia and North Korea. He's calling it the Golden Dome. There's never been anything like this. This is something that's going to be very protective. I think you can rest assured there'll be nothing like this.

Nobody else is capable of building it either. The dome is expected to operate as a shield over the United States. It's meant to provide 24-7 space-based surveillance, intercept enemy missiles, and create a system of defense and deterrence that would have the capacity to shoot down incoming warheads in space before they even land on US soil. Like Reagan's, this plan will feature the use of satellites, lasers, and interceptors. And once again, whether Canada will participate is in question. Mike Stone is a Reuters reporter covering the US arms trade and defense industry. He joins us today to talk about Trump's Golden Dome, Canada's possible involvement, and what it might mean for the state of the global arms race.

Hi, Mike. Hi, good morning. So why don't we start with what the Golden Dome would actually do? What kinds of attacks would it protect from? So the Golden Dome is envisioned as a way to deal with all manner of missile attacks, the intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM cruise missiles, which come in low and fast and hypersonic missiles, which are super, super fast missiles that maneuver in the air. And then also FOBs and MOBs, which are missiles that orbit the earth multiple times and then select their moment to descend and attack, and they elect their angle to attack from.

So Golden Dome will hope to sort of hit a bullet with a bullet with ground-based interceptors or space-based lasers or space-based interceptors and then there's also a part of Golden Dome that is called left of launch. If you envision time as a line that moves from left to right, and the launch moment is X moment, imagine a clandestine operation to blow up the launch pad or injure some of the transistors that would make a launch possible. That's the type of left of launch program that would be envisioned. You could say, for example,

blow up a missile as it's fueling before it goes off into space. Right, right, right. And are we seeing these threats already play out in the world currently? And where are they coming from? So let's talk about missiles. We've all had intercontinental ballistic missiles in our lives since the Cold War. The Chinese have developed a field of, let's call it, tennis bubbles, big inflatable domes where you can't tell if there's a missile underneath it. They've planted them in the middle of the country in a place where they're sort of a kilometer apart.

So you can't hit all of them. Iran, North Korea, these are all viewed as intercontinental ballistic missile threats. But what's occurred in the last five years, and you've seen it being used in Ukraine, is Russian hypersonic missiles. There's this race to develop a hypersonic weapon which can maneuver. It does not follow a ballistic arc and it maneuvers. The maneuvering part is the way that it defeats the traditional defeat mechanism. Right. It's moving in a squiggly line almost. That's correct. The ballistic interceptor that would go up and meet it in the middle, like the two arcs meeting at their zenith, right?

That's not a possibility anymore, except the Patriot missile did defeat a Kinzhal missile in Ukraine. And that's been seen as a huge positive for defeating hypersonic weapons. There's also a thing called a fractional orbital system, which chooses to come from the southern pole over the Gulf of America, Gulf of Mexico, whatever you want to call it. That's not where the United States radars

are looking for weapons right now. That's not an approach that's being defended. It's the current defenses come from over the polls, right? And then from North Korea. So they're designed to defeat Iranian and North Korean launches. So those are the directions that they're supposed to come from. It's only about 60 or 80, depending on the development of the program. It would not defeat the arsenal of Russia. it would not defeat the arsenal of Russia.

It would not defeat the arsenal of the Chinese at this point, just a rogue state. If this thing were to come to pass and actually build out and actually work, it would negate the arsenals of Russia and China overnight. They would be useless and then Russia and China would have to, if they wanted to feel protected, they would have to build their own Golden Dome. So detente, the idea of mutually assured destruction would go away. No one could destroy the United States no matter how many weapons they had and then they would therefore be vulnerable.

That's what's being set up here. Right. And I want to get into those implications a little bit later. But first, I want to bring into those implications a little bit later. But first, I want to bring up what I mentioned earlier in the introduction, which is Ronald Reagan's strategic defense initiative. And there's been a lot of comparisons made between that

and the Golden Dome that's being proposed. And at the time, at Reagan's time, it was something that felt straight out of science fiction. It was criticized as unrealistic and irresponsible for its potential to trigger a new phase of the Cold War arms race. And like just in terms of ambition, like how does Trump's vision compare with Reagan's plan? I am dating myself here, but I remember seeing that video that you described in my parents' bedroom when I was a kid. Attack rays from land-based extamer lasers are redirected by huge mirrors orbiting in

space. Chemical lasers fire beams that burn through the shell of the onrushing missile. It's ostensibly similar. The thing that wasn't possible in Reagan's era was the space lift, right? The launch capacity to effectively get all these products up into space, all these satellites. Now with SpaceX and Blue Origin and a bunch of space lift companies out there, it's not only possible from a space lift perspective, but also affordable almost. So that's the big difference that's made it possible to do this now.

—Music— Trump announced that he'd chosen a design for the Golden Dome last week, but he had actually floated the idea during the 2024 election campaign. State of the art missile defense shield that will be entirely built in America and will create jobs, jobs, jobs, and we're going to have the greatest dome of them all. We're going to have greater. You saw how effective that was. He signed an executive order a week after inauguration calling for its construction, and the order was called the Iron Dome for America, a reference, of course, to Israel's

Iron Dome. When Ronald Reagan wanted to do it many years ago, luckily we didn't, we didn't have the technology then. It was a concept, but we didn't. And now we have phenomenal technology. You see that with Israel. We're out of 319 rockets. They knocked down just about every one of them.

So I think the United States is entitled to that and everything will be made right here. And how much inspiration does Trump draw from that? Israel has Iron Dome and David's thing and what they are are systems that are meant to defeat the ballistic trajectories of missiles coming towards Israel, missiles and rockets and mortars actually coming towards Israel. Picture these ballistic arcs, these perfect arcs, and these systems are meant to defeat each other and create a detente piece, right? Because if you fire the missile in and it's defeated every time, what's the purpose of firing a

missile? So that's what is attempting to be set up. What's interesting about the timing of Donald Trump's signing of the executive order asking for this is it was only seven days after he was inaugurated. Makes it one of those big, big priority decisions that they decided to come out with. And also shows that they were thinking a lot about it before they ascended into office. It is a top priority. It's a signature program. And, you know, when it comes to the Iron Dome, this has been in operation since 2011. It was really built in large part as a response to years of short-range rocket fire, especially

from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Israel has touted that it has a successful interception rate of as high as 90%. See it's freaking in the sky right now, turning. There's another. This is being launched from a different site. So now you'll start to see the Iron Dome system taking them off. Again, many rockets, many interceptions, not much damage, no damage. Can you lay out for me how that system works and how might the US shield go even further

than what the Iron Dome currently does? Absolutely. So picture rockets at the ready and radars all tied into a central nervous system. All of this is ground based, right? Like there are some satellites in the air that like will be looking for launch and they will sense sort of the heat plumes and stuff like that. The difference with Golden Dome is that they're going to put a whole bunch of missiles on satellites up in space in order to affect this boost phase intercept, which is going to be a huge difference. And also what you're dealing with in Israel is very short range stuff, right?

Kilometers, meters even with the example of mortars, right? There's much more time in order to get across the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean or over the polar ice gap. But with hypersonic weapons or a variety of different inbound missile systems that can elect their moment to come from an unexpected direction. There is a rationale to putting stuff in space that would have ground stations that would talk to it, but it's a much grander scale. There are two kinds of people in the world, backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans 15 minutes from now and 15 years from now. They're not just one step ahead, they're 1,000 steps ahead.

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And how would the Golden Dome, as it's planned currently, like fair with drone attacks? This is where I'm gonna have to go off script a little bit and say, they didn't release the architecture publicly. We don't know what it looks like. What I've done when I've talked to some of my sources, some of these companies that are trying to pitch into this, guess what?

There's a whole army of business people out there that have looked at what's happened in Ukraine and attacked the problem of defeating drones and guess what? They're pushing to put a variety of drone intercept radars across the southern border, what for? Fentanyl. It's amazing the ways that they've described it to me. They can pick up the signal that's controlling the drone, where it's coming from, they can track it.

And then once you can track it, you can intercept it or you can render it safe, which is a sort of a complicated way of saying, overwhelm the drone's electronic ins and outs and have it land on the ground. Right, and there are already companies that are pitching this essentially as being part of the Golden Dome architecture. That's right. They went to Huntsville, Alabama last month. They're going to go in June. They're actively writing white papers to try and get a piece of this. And it's seen as a huge new program where a bunch of, you know, tech people from

Silicon Valley are meant to, you know, gain entry into the Pentagon, which is a very, very lucrative and also it's sort of like the good housekeeping seal of approval. Oh, you've got Pentagon contracts. Wow. You must really know what you're doing. And you're also, you know, a tight ship operation, that kind of thing. Right, right, right. And I've heard like North Dakota Senator Kevin Kramer say, the new autonomous space age defense ecosystem is more about Silicon Valley than it is about big,

steep, big metal, right? Big metal, meaning the legacy arms providers like Lockheed Martin. And so this is a very different vibe than is usual. So can you tell me a little bit more about just the kinds of groups that are expected to bid on contracts and just the atmosphere as well around the project, what makes it stand out than conventional projects that have come before?

Good question, great question. There's a lot more devil in the details than what they want. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, they have excellent missile defeat systems, spectacular. They are absolutely going to be tapped to increase production of their interceptors that are currently in place. There will be plenty of money for them to max out production of the stuff that works now.

The hope is that a lot of these younger companies are going to be able to either feed into those great big defense contractors or they will in their own right be given a contract to say, for example, do the connection software. So Andoril, company that makes drones, Palantir, company that makes software, these are going to be names that are going to come out and be given marquee portions of the program. But of course, SpaceX, Elon Musk's company is going to get a huge amount of space lift out of this.

They're basically almost guaranteed billions and billions and billions of dollars in lift. If this stuff gets off the ground, it gonna be on Blue Origin which is Jeff Bezos company or SpaceLift or a variety of new contracts, new SpaceLift companies, but that's the real reason why this thing is possible now is because these reusable rockets to provide SpaceLift exist. I want to talk a bit more about Canada's possible involvement in all of this. Both Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney have confirmed that Canada is in talks with the US to be part of the project. We have an ability, if we so choose, to complete the Golden Dome with investments and partnership.

And it's something that we are looking at and something that has been discussed at a high level, but I'm not sure one negotiates on this. These are military decisions. The two countries, of course, have been partners in the North American Aerospace Defense Command. We call it NORAD, and that's been happening for, that partnership has been happening for years, decades now. Canada helps to monitor the skies and waters across North America.

And Carney has said that, uh, high level talks are underway, um, as to how Canada could contribute to the golden dome, um, but officials haven't really offered many details here. Um, and are there any, uh, hints about what the partnership, um, could be? So Canada is a part of the United States' organic industrial base. That's a phrase that is meant to say it's in this very trusted bubble of it's okay, go ahead and use it. It comes from Canada. So there'll be production that occurs in Canada because there's a huge amount of factory throughput that's in

Canada already for various ground vehicles that get sold. So that's one. But two, if you remember back to the Reagan era, the distant early warning line is the do line is what was being monitored by a series of radars to detect inbound Soviet missiles coming over the pole. So it's all integral to what has been traditionally a, a very symbiotic relationship to do that monitoring. And of course you mentioned NORAD, right? I've been in a variety of rooms, NORAD, but like they monitor

all the stuff in space at NORAD. It's pretty cool. And I expect that to continue. And when you're looking at a launch that's occurring overseas, you know, you can't tell if it's bound for Detroit or Toronto, it's just not possible in those boost phase or left of launch phases of the missile flight. So it's one, you know, it's a very symbolic relationship. And getting involved in a U S missile US missile defense program like would be a real

policy change for Canada. Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney turned down Reagan's invitation in 2005. Former Prime Minister Paul Martin said no to taking part in a US missile defense plan, a move that wasn't without controversy. And now of course, these discussions are happening like at a time when we are in a trade war and there have been annexation threats. Um, you know, how should Canada be weighing all of that, um, in your mind? Like, what are the pros and cons here? I think that there's a real, real chance that Golden Dome is truncated wildly at some point in the coming two to four years because of changes in the government in the United States of America.

So my best guess is that they're going to increase production of existing interceptor missiles. And then who knows what's going to happen. So I would sort of shine, if I were giving advice, I would sort of shine them all on and see how it goes. I want to talk about some of the feasibility issues here. Obviously, you've kind of brought up this is projected to cost somewhere around $175 billion. There have been kind of outside estimates placing it anywhere from 800 billion to several trillion dollars, so much higher. So that's the cost side of things.

But it's also, I want to talk a little bit about the feasibility of the technology as well. So the Golden Dome is being marketed around the use of literal space lasers, or what the administration is referring to as quote, space-based interceptors. And they're meant to not only intercept missiles already in flight, but quote, defeat missile attacks prior to launch.

And I saw it put in the Financial Times as like a system that destroys both the archer, not just the arrow. And in my mind, I'm kind of like picturing red laser guns from Star Wars here, but I'm guessing that is not the kind of thing that we're talking about. So laser is basically directed energy. So picture something that's a very powerful energy generation tool. And then there's a lens in it that focuses the energy and then

simultaneously tracks a moving missile. Right? So think about when you're burning a piece of paper with a magnifying glass as you're a kid. That's kind of what directed energy would be, but then put it up, you know, then make the target, bit the piece of paper into a would be, but then make the target, bit the piece of paper into a missile so you have to track the same time. It's very, very difficult to do that. It's easier in space because there are no atmospheric, there's no air particles to diffuse the power of the directed energy.

It's very hard to do, but there are companies, there's a company called Ursa majors. Right. A lot of this relies on technology that has not developed yet. I should point out, right? Yes. Yes. Or that's in very early stages.

Yes. And the, the reality is that people are ready to feel the stuff. Will they get a chance? And then all of a sudden you have a scale problem, right? This is going to be the dog that catches the car. If Ursa Major gets a contract to put a thousand space-based interceptors on satellites up in space, they're going to have to hire a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, we've talked previously about Israel's Iron Dome. It's probably notable to point out that Israel is the size of New Jersey, right?

Like the amount of land that the Golden Dome would need to cover, especially if Canada is part of the equation here, would be far greater. That's where these costs that you were talking about come in. For $175 billion, it seems like almost a bargain, but you've got estimates that come in at $800 billion. And then once you put these things in space, you've got to maintain them but you've got estimates that come in at $800 billion. And then once you put these things in space, you've got to maintain them. They've you've got to, uh, and you've got to refresh them because the life of a saddle, it's about five years or so, and then it becomes obsolete. So you've got to crash them into the ocean into that, uh, you got to bring them back to earth and then you got to launch another one.

So this will be a constantly refreshing system. I don't think that spending 175 or I don't think you just swipe your credit card once it's going to be one 75 to get it 175 billion U S dollars to get it going. And then it's going to cost a lot over, over time. I just want to land Mike with, um, what the bigger implications of this program will be. And you hinted at that at the beginning of our conversation. You know, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that it was, quote,

seriously concerned about the project and said that it carries, quote, strong offensive implications. A Kremlin spokesperson said that it could force talks between Moscow and Washington about nuclear arms control in the foreseeable future. I've seen some discussions of this turning into a possible space arms race. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are about kind of the bigger implications here about what it might mean, what the Golden Dome project might mean for the state of the global arms race. The theory that has governed the use of nuclear weapons for decades has been mutually assured destruction.

Everyone has the same number of weapons between Russia and the United States, and China is not a party to that arms control treaty. So because of mutually assured destruction, no one between the Russian and the United States fires their weapons at each other because everyone would die. That would be, that's the idea. If you put a dome up, if you have a really good way

of defeating the hundreds of nuclear weapons that are pointed at one country, then the other country would just be exposed. So there's no longer mutually assured destruction. There's no longer detente. So what would occur is the Russians would want to develop their own dome. Gosh, they go in with the Chinese on it at the same time. And then you're sort of off to the races on creating these domes in order to protect the ability to then get back to parody of mutually assured destruction, which is a pretty sad state.

Mike, appreciate your time today. Thank you. Thank you. That's all for today. That's all for today. I'm Elaine Chao and for Jamie Poisson, thanks for listening to Frontburner and talk to you tomorrow.