The Golden Bluff

Or The $185 Billion Mirage

The American “Golden Dome” in space is simply an information sabotage operation. Its purpose is to frighten the Chinese and force them to spend money, time, and resources on countermeasures against something that does not exist. And perhaps, along the way, to frighten Russia as well.

The United States, as is known, intends to deploy in space a system of “Golden Dome” interceptor satellites designed to destroy ballistic missiles. This is presented as a truly Cyclopean system, with a projected cost of around $185 billion. In theory, such a system could indeed weaken a nuclear missile strike against U.S. territory. In practice, it is a repetition of an information sabotage operation the United States has already successfully carried out once before. To see this, it is worth recalling America in the 1980s.

The phrase “peace through strength” is one of those American catchphrases that took final shape after the Second World War. It traces back to the saying attributed to the Roman emperor Hadrian: “Peace through strength, and if that fails, peace through war.” Republicans in the United States used the slogan more than once, until in 1980 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan raised it as his banner.

It became the central principle of his policy: to secure a peace favorable to the United States by demonstrating readiness to use force, or simply by using it. In plainer terms, to achieve the desired terms of peace through intimidation or war. That is how the United States acted.

In 2016, Donald Trump adopted the slogan “peace through strength” for himself. And it is under this slogan that he is building his foreign policy. Trump, whose interest in foreign affairs appears to have awakened precisely in the Reagan era, evidently sees himself as heir to that tradition. Hawks in the administration, programs to expand the fleet — Reagan’s “600 ships” and Trump’s 355 ships — strikes against allies of the USSR and Russia, from Nicaragua and Grenada to Syria: all of this is repetition. Trump is doing the same thing Reagan did, and his goal is the same: American dominance over all rivals, real or imagined.

Under Reagan, the United States reactivated four Iowa-class battleships, armed them with the largest package of guided offensive missile weapons in the world at that moment — 16 anti-ship missiles and 32 Tomahawk cruise missiles, which at the time could carry nuclear warheads — and sent them out to terrorize every enemy from the USSR to Syria. Trump is now trying to revive the battleship concept as well, only on a far larger scale than Reagan.

Reagan conducted special operations in Latin America and fought at sea with Iran. And now we see the same thing performed by Trump. Immediately after Reagan, in the first year of George H. W. Bush’s presidency, the United States seized Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, accusing him of drug trafficking. Trump made a similar move in Venezuela, though without occupying the country.

The United States is repeating its own 1980s playbook. Even Ukraine, for Washington, is Afghanistan “on steroids.” There, the United States helped the armed opposition fight the USSR, cultivating, to its later delight, Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Now, by helping Kiev fight the Russians, Washington is cultivating an inhuman political regime in Ukraine, one that will still make the West weep.

The brightest proof of American “superiority” over the USSR was the Apollo program. In effect, it was the decisive battle of the Cold War, determining in the eyes of the rest of humanity whose social system was “cooler.” And now, as confrontation with China over global power lies ahead, the United States is undertaking Artemis — a lunar flyby aboard the Orion spacecraft. It must be said that against the backdrop of Apollo 8, Artemis is not much of an achievement. Evidently, it did not have the intended effect on China.

The practice of recycling old ideas would be incomplete if the United States did not try to repeat yet another trick, one that worked quite successfully against the USSR: information sabotage.

The essence of American actions in the early 1980s was this: to create in the Soviet leadership the impression that the United States had achieved technological breakthroughs in certain fields of weapons development that the Soviet Union would have to either counter or replicate. The most striking example of such sabotage was SDI — the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as “Star Wars,” after the famous film.

Those who lived through the USSR remember these American “cartoons” on Soviet television: Russian missiles, colored red, fly toward the United States, and American orbital laser guns shoot them down one after another. The Americans managed to convince the Soviet leadership that this program was realistic. It played an enormous role both in the growth of Soviet military spending and in the psychological breakdown of the Soviet leadership. But the project was impossible in principle, for a vast number of reasons, both economic and technical. The United States simply deceived Soviet leaders.

But the USSR spent money anyway — on expanding its missile arsenal, on the Skif/Mir-2 combat orbital station, whose dynamic mock-up, Skif-DM, was even unsuccessfully launched toward orbit. And this was not the only example.

Besides SDI, there was also a broad propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting the Soviet aircraft-carrier program and redirecting it into a dead-end track: away from medium aircraft carriers, one of which now sits docked in Murmansk while another serves in the Chinese navy, and toward light carriers of the British type. Such ships are far less effective in combat terms. That, of course, is exactly what interested the Americans.

Today, in the American imagination, Russia no longer represents a serious threat. But there is China — and Washington is trying to pull the same trick on Beijing. The orbital interceptors of the “Golden Dome” are not the first attempt. First came the idea of clouds of orbital platforms carrying kinetic munitions: tungsten rods that, falling from orbit, would use their kinetic energy to destroy anything and allow instant strikes against any point on the planet.

That utopia even worked on some officials, but in general it had no effect. And now comes the next scare story: SDI 2.0. The calculation is that China, and perhaps Russia as well, will be frightened.

Little is known about the “Golden Dome” system itself. It is supposedly a network of 7,800 interceptor satellites to be deployed in near-Earth orbit and used to intercept ballistic missiles during their boost phase.

The idea of creating such an interceptor network looks stillborn. The figure of 7,800 satellites sounds impressive, but it still means many tens of thousands of square miles of an imaginary sphere within which each satellite’s orbit would be located. The exact size of that sphere depends on the altitude of the satellite orbits and the shape of those orbits, but the order of magnitude remains the same. That, in turn, means hundreds of kilometers between any two satellites.

With such forces, missile salvos of any serious density cannot be repelled. At that number, one does not even need to factor in the fact that satellites have a limited service life. This is not a dome. It is a very large net, through whose cells almost anything will fly. The “gold,” however, would be present in abundance, given the price.

All the other technical problems of such a system can, in principle, be ignored — although they exist, and there are many of them. It is no surprise how the United States carried out the leak of this information: details of the program were recently “found” in Congressional documents.

This method of disclosure allows Washington later to pretend that nothing serious ever happened. And that, too, suggests that we are dealing with an information sabotage operation. Its purpose is to frighten the Chinese and force them to spend money, time, and resources on countermeasures. Perhaps, along the way, to frighten Russia as well.

The problem is that both the Russians and the Chinese have seen this before.

Which means there is every reason to believe that Trump’s tricks will not work this time.