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What happens when the United States tries to build a missile shield so ambitious that Russia and China start dreaming up weapons that no defense can stop? Two demonstrations of Russian weapons pageantry this fall offered a clear, if unsettling, glimpse of that future as President Vladimir Putin proudly showcased systems built to sidestep American defenses.
On Oct. 26, Putin claimed the successful test of the Burevestnik long-range, nuclear-powered cruise missile. Powered by a small nuclear reactor, the Burevestnik is said to be able to stay aloft indefinitely, enabling long circuitous flights that avoid radar detection. Three days later, Putin triumphantly touted the demonstration of another, seemingly even more hair-raising nuclear weapon system — the Poseidon, an autonomous, long-range nuclear torpedo, again designed to avoid U.S. defenses and hold homeland targets at risk. While dramatic, these public demonstrations were not a surprise for those following the U.S.-Russian strategic tango. Rather, they preview a riskier, less predictable future if the United States upends strategic stability in its pursuit of “Golden Dome” strategic defenses. This conclusion is drawn from a core dynamic found in previous strategic missile-defense efforts — including the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative — that pursuit of even partial immunity from strategic weapons is extremely expensive and can spark an adversary’s rapid development of new and more challenging methods to reestablish deterrence.
Indeed, Burevestnik, Poseidon, and the other “super weapons” originally announced by Putin in 2018 were explicitly — if not legitimately — justified as attempts to overcome then-limited but growing American missile-defense capabilities. In the time since these weapons were announced, the United States has committed to even more spending on missile defense, including announcing the extremely ambitious Golden Dome project in January, which promises to greatly expand its strategic defenses against long-range missiles at the cost of weaponizing space. This project, and the ambiguity surrounding its scope, timeline, and costs, has in turn afforded greater credence to those original claims by Moscow, and reportedly inspired similar projects in China and North Korea.
Throughout history, the United States and its adversaries have become trapped in these types of negative action-reaction loops. But Washington now has a unique opportunity to demonstrate it has learned from past spirals. With the global interest in — and anxieties over — Golden Dome, the United States has a chance to redefine its missile-defense aspirations, channel them into cost effective and impactful pathways, and begin the long, slow journey down from the escalation ladder the Russian “superweapon” demonstrations have begun to exploit.
If the United States misses this opportunity, we know what will follow. Supporters of Golden Dome will point out that new Russian and Chinese long-range and hypersonic capacities began long before Golden Dome was initiated, when U.S. missile defenses were limited in scope and capability. They will argue that the United States is choosing defense as opposed to offense, and that the introduction of Golden Dome could help compensate for Washington’s rapidly eroding margin of conventional military superiority in places such as the Indo-Pacific. Russian and Chinese advocates will say that their programs are necessary responses to U.S. efforts to undermine mutual vulnerability, a trend that predated Golden Dome, but now seems to have been turbocharged by its announcement. The finger-pointing will continue while all sides continue to build up.
Though it may be tempting to dismiss exotic weapons like Burevestnik and Poseidon and their purported justifications as cynical political stunts, the most likely impact of Golden Dome is to incentivize America’s adversaries to double down on such destabilizing behavior by further developing long-range cruise missiles, hypersonic systems, undersea platforms, and even space-based offensive weapons systems. Taken together, these systems are much more concerning than any one type of weapon, and strategists should take steps now to avoid incentivizing a world with a greater reliance on them.
Historically, Missile Defense Has Been a Net Loss
When President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1984, it was built around an incredible promise — to build an impenetrable missile shield by placing hundreds of interceptor satellites in orbit. While that task was quickly found to be impossible — and seemingly made unnecessary by the end of the Cold War — the modern equivalent in Golden Dome may stand a better technical chance of success. The technology required needs to be thoroughly proven, and the sky-high costs need to find a viable path to completion, but the prospect of an interceptor satellite constellation is no longer strictly science fiction.
Compared to the Cold War initiative, the topline space-based component of Golden Dome proposes that the satellites in orbit carry fast-reacting missiles, rather than just rely on powerful lasers, to destroy hostile intercontinental ballistic missiles during their boost phase. A variety of complex factors — such as the precise calculus of orbital altitude, interceptor burn times, and expected accuracy — will ultimately determine how many satellites are needed and how many trillions the project might cost.
If technologically successful, the space-based interceptors of Golden Dome could afford the United States a paradigm-shifting ability to negate a large portion of an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile salvo, upending a cornerstone of strategic stability which has been in place since the 1960s. Even if only partially implemented, the demonstrated viability and procurement of such a defense would change nuclear strategy across the world overnight. The mere suggestion that the United States could negate a large portion of Russia’s current long-range missile inventory would send ripples through Moscow and cause lesser-armed adversaries to go back to the drawing board in fevered pursuit of a more effective deterrent force.
This sobering probability is why the long-shot success of Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors may, paradoxically, generate far more dangerous new risks and liabilities than they are worth. Space-based interceptors would be completely ineffective against threats that stay within the atmosphere or exist undersea — cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and drones. This limitation is inherent due to the mechanics of sub-orbital (i.e., outside the atmosphere, but not on a trajectory that would keep an object in orbit) interception, where flight geometries are more predictable and there is little to no atmosphere to impede high-speed interceptors or adjust the path of targets. For in-atmosphere missiles like hypersonic vehicles, which take advantage of aerodynamics to chart more dynamic flight paths and potentially maneuver around defenses, interception can be extremely difficult from the ground — and virtually impossible from above. Even traditional cruise missiles, properly shielded from radars by advanced stealth technologies and similarly immune to space-based interception, need not depend on particularly sophisticated physics to hold homeland targets at risk.
This means that, even as the United States invests more in defending against missiles that travel through space, it may be left even more vulnerable than before as adversaries reconfigure their arsenals to feature higher numbers of defense-skirting systems. If intercontinental ballistic missiles — including those carried on submarines — are no longer seen as a dependable capability for a nuclear state’s deterrence force, the next logical step would be to develop an ever-widening array of offensive systems, forcing the hardware of nuclear deterrence even further into less-understood, and potentially more surprising arenas. In this way, Golden Dome’s topline focus on space-based interception — even assuming complete success — builds a strong countervailing incentive for adversaries, and may result in a net loss for Washington. However, this very dilemma may also offer a generational opportunity to acknowledge and directly engage with the concerns of rival nuclear powers, and open avenues for more serious discussions on strategic risk reduction.
Adversaries Get a Vote
By putting the bulk of its chips on the highest-end elements of Golden Dome, Washington may also find itself on the wrong end of a long-understood strategic asymmetry. From the original missile-driven arms race of the 1960s, it was clear that the sheer weight of numbers could offer a country a reliable offensive capability, even if the technology was less than 100 percent reliable or if there were reasonably effective defenses against them. The same basic logic holds today. Under the staggeringly expensive Golden Dome, Washington’s adversaries may find themselves reaching for more cost-effective means of attaining their objectives — to the point where the United States may find itself ensnared in a perverse process of self-cost imposition.
In addition to pursuing new, exotic forms of weaponry, U.S adversaries may simply seek to overwhelm Golden Dome through mass. A saturation attack, in which an adversary launches huge numbers of missiles to deplete interceptors and ensure a meaningful number of warheads make it through, would take advantage of the likely huge cost differential between the proposed space-based defenses and traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles. This vulnerability can be further exploited by equipping those missiles with decoys, chaff, or other measures meant to reduce the success rate of defenses — again, simple technologies which come drastically cheaper than increasing the number of interceptors.
What strategists realized by the end of the 1960s about the cost-exchange ratios underlying this dynamic would come to inform the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a product of detente. In the treaty, the United States and Soviet Union agreed to limit their missile-defense projects to just two complexes — not just to halt a destabilizing and self-reinforcing intercontinental ballistic missile arms race, but to deliberately acknowledge and preserve some measure of mutual strategic vulnerability between the two nuclear superpowers. Despite efforts to develop and exploit advantages throughout the Cold War, this basic recognition of strategic vulnerability made peace with a core tension of the nuclear age — that pursuit of strategic defenses could only, counter-intuitively, result in an acceleration of offensive capabilities by the other side.
Even following Reagan’s pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative, this foundational logic subsequently found a way of reasserting itself, most notably in the form of joint statements that guaranteed lower-level missile defenses “will not pose a realistic threat to the strategic nuclear force of the other side.” And when today’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense was deployed in the 2010s, special care was given to communicate its limited scope and purpose to both Beijing and Moscow — albeit in vain. Today, Golden Dome looks to put a clear end to this understanding and reject the hard-won and long-held lesson that, in nuclear deterrence, one’s adversaries always get a vote — a problem which requires an even more deliberate approach in an increasingly multipolar nuclear threat landscape.
A Smarter Approach to a Hard Problem
Recognizing these core precepts of strategic stability should not be perceived as justifying in any way the attempts of Beijing, Moscow, or Pyongyang to vastly augment their arsenals or inappropriately pursue dangerous nuclear capabilities. Even if existing strategic defenses like Ground-based Midcourse Defense have caused legitimate worry, fielding exotic nuclear systems like Burevestnik or building traditional missiles en masse are irresponsible strategies that trade on risking strategic surprise in the name of marginal capability gains.
But one risky project should not beget another, and attempting to reduce the viability of traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles is clearly not a solution that is worth the strategic costs. A world in which Golden Dome’s long-shot success has removed this 60-year pillar of nuclear deterrence would drastically reduce the certainty of all nuclear states in any crisis and diminish their ability to send and read strategic signals. Worse, the proposed alternate strategic weapons — including systems such as Burevestnik, Poseidon, and space-based nuclear weapons — all threaten to reduce detection and reaction times greatly, driving the kind of hair-trigger anxieties not seen since the earliest days of long-range missiles.
The space-based interception element of Golden Dome is by far the most technologically challenging and costly component of the wider project and carries the greatest risks when it comes to reducing U.S. ability to navigate future confrontations with its nuclear competitors. Recognizing the extreme price tag, and even the limited value for deterring the growing number of adversarial hypersonic, cruise, undersea, and drone weapons programs, it could be to the advantage of the United States to engage with Russia, China, and potentially other nuclear powers on this aspect of Golden Dome. Both countries have already said that the space-based interceptors are one of the most alarming parts of the Golden Dome initiative. Seeking to engage on this particular front might allow Washington to seize the diplomatic high ground by recognizing the shared dilemma of strategic instability, while providing a venue to explain why it feels such defensive capabilities are warranted in the face of unconstrained missile threats and even novel space-weapons development by both Russia and China. Though it would surely face headwinds (e.g., China, for instance, has historically demonstrated an aversion to engaging in structured discussions on nuclear arms control), a trilateral engagement could break ground in acknowledging the action-reaction loop in offensive and defensive systems, establish guardrails and even temporary restraints on the most destabilizing of these systems. It could also build an appreciation for why a verifiable strategic stability architecture is in the mutual interests of all three countries going forward.
An additional advantage to discussing and potentially pausing the pursuit of space-based interceptors is the acknowledgment that such interceptors could create significant space debris. The United States has made good headway in developing a norm prohibiting the intentional creation of space debris through direct ascent anti-satellite tests. Such debris poses a problem for the long-term sustainability of operations in Earth’s orbits — an increasingly critical place for global economic activity. If the United States were to walk away from this norm-building effort, it would both lose significant credibility as a leader in responsible space behaviors and face the growing threat of space debris in “the decisive domain for almost all military operations.”
At the same time, Washington should highlight to the world why unconstrained missile developments and unchecked new technologies would endanger strategic stability worldwide — with or without the potential impacts of Golden Dome. More specifically, recognizing that one of the purposes of Russia’s “superweapons” is to provide asymmetric advantages and thus destabilize the strategic balance, the potential global impacts of fielding nuclear-powered cruise missiles and autonomous, long-range nuclear torpedoes (adding tsunami-creation to the devastating consequences of shoreline nuclear weapons use) call for an international focus on the control of these weapons. Chinese development of fractional orbital bombardment systems have equally challenging implications. Washington should offer to discuss and potentially limit space-based interceptors (with all the problems they entail), if it receives a commitment of equal restraint on Chinese and Russian weapons programs that concern the United States and its allies.
This offer should not be construed as a form of unilateral disarmament or as trading capabilities for vague promises of restraint. But — once assured of good-faith reciprocal action on destabilizing weapons across the board — the Pentagon could then be free to focus its precious resources and know-how on upgrading the critical space-based sensing and communications layer of strategic missile defense and better integrating its various shorter-range and theater-range defenses against evolving threats. This would meaningfully strengthen the ability for the United States to detect, attribute, and potentially defeat the most likely missile and drone threats at home and abroad, but minimize the likelihood of feeding the unhealthier dimensions of ongoing tripartite and secondary multipartite nuclear arms races.
Limiting the expansive space-based interception component of Golden Dome would save the United States not just a great deal of money, but also from evaporating the critical diplomatic capital necessary to find sustainable new pathways towards strategic risk reduction in a multi-peer environment. This should not be perceived as a form of strategic surrender. Rather, the United States should only hold out the prospect of restraint if such restraint would provide the United States with clear leverage — most notably to compel its nuclear rivals to limit the developments that led to Washington’s desire for space-based interceptors in the first place. In the end, the Golden Dome debate among the United States and its allies and adversaries may break down to a cost-benefit assessment, as so many issues do. But the United States should be careful not to accept or deny the initiative without evaluating each of its constituent parts and their longer-term effects on broader strategic stability.
As the British strategist Sir Michael Quinlan once wrote in reaction to the Strategic Defense Initiative, there is an element of “the utopian, similar to the longing to abolish nuclear weapons themselves, to the desire to find physically-guaranteed escape from the nuclear revolution,” or to seek to escape its cold and unforgiving shadow through the pursuit of some “technologically-assured exemption.” Mutual vulnerability is here to stay — whether we like it or not. Rather than seeking exemption from it, the United States should engage more directly with its potential adversaries on this front and use all possible leverage to craft a more stable and secure base from which to navigate future conflict.
Andrew Facini is the communications director for the Council on Strategic Risks and a senior fellow at the Janne E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons, focusing on nuclear-weapons issues. His topics of expertise include U.S. nuclear policy and force structure, China’s historical and emerging nuclear doctrines, and cultural understandings of nuclear conflict.
Mallory Stewart is the executive vice president of the Council on Strategic Risks and previously served as assistant secretary for the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability at the U.S. Department of State. Her areas of expertise include weapons of mass destruction law and policy, missile defense, outer space security policy, and risk management regarding emerging and disruptive technologies.
Image: Eriknadir via Wikimedia Commons
