Star Wars is back, with an executive order from President Trump that the White House said “directs the building of the Iron Dome missile defense shield for America.”
The order, issued on Monday night, didn’t quite do that. It was more a vaguely worded set of instructions to accelerate current programs or explore new approaches to defending the continental United States than a blueprint for arming the heavens with thousands of antimissile weapons, sensors and tracking devices.
But two blocks away, on the same evening, the Office of Management and Budget issued a 56-page spreadsheet that detailed the suspension of funding for thousands of programs. They included most of the major U.S. efforts to reduce the amount of nuclear fuel that terrorists might seize, to guard against biological weapon attacks and to manage initiatives around the globe to curb the spread of nuclear arms.
The two announcements seemed to encapsulate the administration’s conflicting instincts in its opening weeks. Mr. Trump wants to build big and take the Space Force he created to new heights, even at the risk of new arms races. That effort has been underway since Ronald Reagan’s day, with only mixed results.
But in its drive to shut down programs it believes could be creations of the so-called deep state, the administration wants to cut off funding for many programs that seek to reduce the chances of an attack on the United States — an attack that could very well come in forms other than a missile launched from North Korea, China or Russia.
A judge paused Mr. Trump’s spending freeze on Tuesday, but the president’s intentions are clear.
Though Mr. Trump calls his plan the Iron Dome, it has little if any resemblance to the Israeli system of the same name that has succeeded in destroying small missiles that move at a snail’s pace compared with the blinding speeds of intercontinental warheads.
Any system that will cover the United States will have to cope with a Russian arsenal of 1,250 deployed weapons, a fast-growing Chinese arsenal that the Pentagon believes will be of similar size within a decade, maybe earlier, and a North Korean threat that has only grown larger since Mr. Trump’s diplomacy with Kim Jong-un collapsed.
The Russians and the Chinese have been experimenting with hypersonic weapons that weave an unpredictable path within the atmosphere, making their trajectory far harder to anticipate. And the Russians boast of an undersea autonomous nuclear torpedo that can cross oceans to hit the West Coast.
Still, enthusiasts of missile defenses celebrated Mr. Trump’s announcement, hoping it would jump-start programs that have been operating for some time. Thomas Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on Tuesday that the order would accelerate work on space-based sensors to detect hypersonic missiles like the ones that were launched last year by the Biden administration.
“But the big piece is space-based interceptors,” he said. “That is coming, even if the implications of space as a warfighting domain hasn’t sunk in on people.”
Missile defense has long been a favorite topic for Mr. Trump, who has envisioned the project as the next step for the Space Force, which he created in his first term.
But it could also trigger a new arms race, some experts fear. And unaddressed in Mr. Trump’s new initiative is the threat of nuclear terrorism and blackmail with an atomic bomb, which might be smuggled into the United States on a truck or a boat. Many experts see the terrorism threat as far bigger than an enemy firing a single missile or a swarm.
In 2001, after Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government scrambled to get wide-ranging advice on how outwit terrorists and better protect Americans from the threats of germ, computer, chemical and nuclear attacks.
“The combination of simultaneously deploying a missile defense system of questionable effectiveness against any real threat” while “suspending operative programs against nuclear or bioterrorists, sophisticated cyberattackers or others” is a “terrible trade-off,” said Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama who now heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
“The Iron Dome reference conjures up the success of the Israeli missile defense, but that’s misleading given the relatively short-range missiles that Israel defends against and the small territory it needs to defend,” said Mr. Moniz, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with long experience in nuclear weapons
Asked about the suspension of counternuclear programs during her first press briefing at the White House, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that “this is not a ban.”
“This is a temporary pause and a freeze to ensure that all of the money going out from Washington, D.C., is in line with the president’s agenda,” she said.
Critics of the executive order say it is more a list than a program, and includes systems that have never panned out. In an interview, Theodore A. Postol, an emeritus professor of science and national security at M.I.T., called Mr. Trump’s missile plan “a compendium of flawed weapons systems that have been shown to be unworkable.”
“It’s going to be a giant black hole for taxpayer dollars with nothing coming out of it,” he said.
Stephen I. Schwartz, an independent consultant who studies the cost of military projects, estimates that over the decades the United States has spent more than $400 billion on the kind of antimissile goals that Mr. Trump now says will provide “for the common defense” of the continental United States and its allies.
One failed plan of the nation’s star warriors centered on firing into orbit thousands of small rockets, or “Brilliant Pebbles,” meant to track and destroy enemy missiles by the sheer force of impact, which in theory would turn them into tiny bits of space junk.
During his first term, Mr. Trump in 2019 vowed to reinvigorate and reinvent the art of making of reliable defenses that could shoot down enemy missiles. “Our goal is simple: to ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States anywhere, any time, any place,” he said.
The strategy, Mr. Trump added, “is grounded in one overriding objective: to detect and destroy every type of missile attack against any American target, whether before or after launch. When it comes to defending America, we will not take any chances. We will only take action. There is no substitute for American military might.”
In fact, Mr. Trump offered only incremental plans and steps. The Pentagon’s explanation for the 2019 initiative looked mainly at destroying small numbers of missiles launched by regional powers, rather than overwhelming strikes by Russia or China.
Weeks after Mr. Trump unveiled his plans, the Pentagon said it successfully tested a new method for intercepting missiles aimed at American cities. The exercise appeared to simulate how the United States might defend against an adversary like North Korea.
The test’s novel feature was that it fired two interceptor rockets at an incoming mock warhead, rather than one. In contrast, antimissile experts say Russia could launch missiles that rained down many hundreds of deadly warheads on the United States.
Antimissile skeptics point to those kinds of large numbers and big threats — typically hidden during a nuclear attack in swarms of thousands of decoys — as posing insurmountable problems for a reliable system of defense.
