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Should Canada Help Build Trump’s Golden Dome?

Total protection against nuclear attack is a fantasy. But saying no won’t be easy

In July of 1979, Ronald Reagan, then eighteen months from the presidency, was taken to see the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD. The underground facility, jointly run by the United States and Canada, is carved inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs. In one widely cited account of the visit, many on the tour were visibly awed by the scale and seriousness of the operation. But when Reagan asked what the US could do to stop a nuclear missile, the answer shocked him: nothing.

As the story goes, Reagan was told that all NORAD could do was track incoming warheads and provide information for retaliation. During the flight home, one aide remembered, Reagan “couldn’t believe the United States had no defense against Soviet attack. He slowly shook his head and said, ‘We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.’”

Reagan agonized over the idea of the US being vulnerable. “We should have some way of defending ourselves,” he concluded. His vision eventually took the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative: a plan for futuristic weapons in space—lasers, interceptors, armed satellites—that would render nuclear missiles “impotent and obsolete.” SDI was a promise as sweeping as it was speculative, and it ultimately petered out under the weight of its technical limits and astronomical costs.

After Reagan left office, his successors, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, quietly but significantly pared back SDI, largely shelving the space-based part and concentrating on land-based interceptor missiles that could meet a much more limited threat. About two decades later, George W. Bush went forward with this version of the idea. His system was designed to defeat not thousands or even hundreds of weapons launched by a peer adversary but to stop a handful of missiles from a so-called rogue state. Though something workable was produced, it, too, fell short of ambitions (only about half of its highly scripted test interceptions have worked).

Now Donald Trump has unveiled his own iteration of Reagan’s old aspiration: the Golden Dome. He claims it will cost $175 billion (US), be completed by the end of his term, be 100 percent successful, and thus be capable of “forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland.” The plan has notable supporters, mainly Republicans, defence hawks, and industry players. Few credible experts believe the hype. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, estimates the cost could rise to more than $3 trillion (US) and the system could take decades to build—if it can ever succeed.

Trump has asked Canada to join. He has spoken of between $61 billion and $71 billion (US) as the Canadian contribution—though he has generously offered it to us for free for the mere price of our sovereignty. The previous times missile defence arose, under Reagan and Bush, Canada was also invited. We said no—sort of—and life went on. However, in Trump’s fantasy of the Golden Dome, he wants Canada to commit during his term. Though there were hints of repercussions for refusing to join the Reagan and Bush projects, they never amounted to much. Trump’s assault on our economy makes the possibility of reprisals more serious.

But the key difference between today’s project and the Reagan and Bush invitations is that missile defence itself is no longer a hypothetical. A limited—if leaky—missile defence does now exist, built in Alaska at great cost since the George W. Bush presidency. Although we formally declined to participate, Canada is embedded in its architecture. NORAD operates many of the sensors and networks that support the system. And with significant upgrades to NORAD now underway, even as Canada insists no decision has been made on the Golden Dome, the real question is not whether Canada will participate—but on what terms and to what end.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, strategists have searched for ways to defend against catastrophic attack. The advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) in the 1950s exposed the limits of that goal. In practical terms, there is no reliable way to shoot them down. It requires striking targets moving at extraordinary speed, in the near vacuum of space, across thousands of kilometres—what missile-defence engineers call “hitting a bullet with a bullet.”

By the late 1960s, many in the defence establishment had concluded the price of security was accepting mutual vulnerability rather than chasing the illusion of perfect protection. This came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a doctrine enshrined in two key arms control agreements between the US and the Soviet Union in 1972: the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Together, they sought to make nuclear war untenable by preserving what strategists call an “assured second-strike capability.” Each side would retain the ability to retaliate after a surprise attack, guaranteeing that any country irrational enough to launch a first strike would be obliterated by the retaliatory—or second—strike.

SALT drew most of the attention. It channelled the buildup of arsenals in ways that ensured neither superpower believed it could escape annihilation. The ABM Treaty flowed directly from this reasoning, placing strict limits on missile-defence systems. The thinking was that if you believed you could erect a shield that could stop at least some incoming warheads, the temptation to launch a first strike would grow; you hit early, wipe out most of your opponent’s forces, then rely on your defences to blunt the weakened response. Leaving aside the reality that a first strike would still be madness, as no missile-defence system could ever be fully trusted to deal with the retaliation, the tactic had a certain grim logic. The only answer was to remove the incentive entirely and turn away from the notion that nuclear war could be anything other than a suicide pact.

Not everyone accepted MAD. Some argued it was wrong to foreclose the possibility of ballistic missile defence (BMD). In their view, the assumption of shared extinction condemned the US to accept the existence of the Soviet Union. Even worse, it established equivalence between the two—they would be equally vulnerable. On a political, ideological, and indeed a moral level, the idea that America’s existence required the acquiescence of the godless Soviets deeply offended some people.

By the late 1970s, opponents of the SALT and ABM treaties, and of détente more broadly, controlled the Republican Party, with Reagan as their leader. It did not matter that BMD was impossible. What mattered was that the US should not accept MAD, or any limitations on the effort to overcome it. Reagan’s missile defence was an attempt to will an alternative to MAD into being. As Frances FitzGerald notes in Way Out There in the Blue, her sweeping account of missile defence under Reagan, the pursuit proved “the extent to which our national discourse about foreign and........

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