Trump's obstacle course toward space tech defense

President Trump wants to succeed where Ronald Reagan failed in the 1980s: equipping the United States with a missile defense system, the Golden Dome, to protect the nation from any type of attack from space. Essentially, it's an ultramodern defense system, based on land, sea, air, and space, that destroys enemy offensive weapons launched toward the United States before they can do any harm.

According to Trump, it will cost a lot, but not as much as the offices responsible for conducting the actual calculations say, and it will be completed within the three years remaining of his term. While there are many doubts about the President's statements, the need for such a system is greater now than ever. Many believe that the defense of the United States, specifically its homeland, is outdated, if not entirely obsolete.

While not everything has changed, much has changed in this field. Above all, we now have to deal with new offensive means, first and foremost the unstoppable hypersonic missiles, but also nuclear warheads released from very low orbit—200 kilometers above the ground, for example—or nuclear bombs exploded at an altitude of 100 kilometers or more, and finally the terrible FOBs, Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems, theoretically prohibited by the SALT treaties. These are orbiting spacecraft loaded with nuclear weapons that can be activated and released at any time. All weapons that until recently simply did not exist.

For example, a nuclear charge detonating 100 or 200 kilometers above the ground would create an electromagnetic pulse with apocalyptic consequences, knocking out aircraft electronics and all types of control and management devices. Practically everything powered or controlled by computers or electronics of any kind would cease to function, from automatic home gates to hospital equipment to communications systems.

Donald Trump's idea, announced last January and forcefully reiterated recently, has a basis. Indeed, now that the American press, led by the Washington Post, has described simulations of a possible US response to a nuclear attack, the issue is burning and public. Perhaps prompted by the Pentagon, the American press is describing a dire scenario: if a nuclear power were to launch an attack on the US, the President would have only 45 minutes to decide whether and how to respond, from the moment the infrared satellite surveillance system raised the alert.