Trump’s Orbital Missile Shield Could Aid His Nuclear Disarmament Foray

The White House’s new blueprints to construct the world’s first space-based missile defense shield could become part of a greater master plan to push for reductions in the atomic weapons arsenals across the great nuclear powers, says an American space defense scholar.

President Donald Trump’s just-issued Executive Order, “The Iron Dome for America,” envisions creating “a next-generation missile defense shield” that relies on “space-based interceptors” to shoot down nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“President Ronald Reagan endeavored to build an effective defense against nuclear attacks,” the White House states in the order, “and while this program resulted in many technological advances, it was canceled before its goal could be realized.”

With the Earth-encircling anti-missile dome, President Trump could be aiming for a redux of President Reagan’s simultaneous pursuit of his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile shield and his years-long talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev aimed at drastically cutting both sides’ immense stockpiles of nuclear weapons, Elena Grossfeld, a space defense expert at King’s College London who has written extensively on Russia’s campaign to modernize and expand its space and nuclear weaponry, tells me in an interview.

Reagan’s vision was to create a shield against rocket-lofted nuclear warheads that was so perfect it would render those weapons useless.

The Kremlin’s communist leadership – archenemy of the democratic U.S. during the superpower race to build the globe’s greatest armada of plutonium-packed missiles – was initially terrified of Reagan’s planned space shield, predicting it could empower the Pentagon to launch a devastating first strike – or all-out nuclear barrage – against the Soviet Union, and then block any ICBM counter-attack by Moscow.

Reagan’s genius was in offering to share the shield with Gorbachev and the Soviet citizenry, and in proposing the dismantling of both sides’ nuclear stockpiles.

President Reagan, say archivists at the U.S. State Department, aimed to create “a national defense system that could make nuclear weapons obsolete.”

The American actor-turned-president envisaged “a space-based missile defense program that could protect the country from a large-scale nuclear attack.”

He called the fantastical shield of the future, designed to prevent an intercontinental war of nuclear missiles, “a peace initiative” that would benefit all the world’s peoples.

“Privately,” the State Department archivists say, “Reagan was quite adamant that the goal of U.S. defense research should be to eliminate the need for nuclear weapons, which he thought were fundamentally immoral.”

Scholars at the American National Museum of Nuclear Science & History say President Reagan ultimately aimed to push for the abolition of nuclear arms across the face of the Earth.

In an interview just a few days after sketching out his dream of a celestial shield that could destroy nuclear missiles in flight, the museum’s scholars say, “Reagan insisted that SDI was not part of a new arms race but instead a path to ridding the world of nuclear weapons altogether. To prove this point, the president suggested that the United States could eventually share SDI with the Soviet Union.”

These scholars quoted Reagan as saying: “A President of the United States could offer to give that same defensive weapon to them to prove to them that there was no longer any need for keeping these missiles. Or with that defense, he could then say to them, ‘I am willing to do away with all my missiles. You do away with yours.’”

Reagan offered to share the SDI missile defense technology in a sequence of summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev – who turned out to be a remarkable pro-democracy and pro-peace reformist – if both sides began radically reducing their nuclear arsenals, the museum scholars say.

“The Strategic Defense Initiative was ultimately very popular with the American public,” they add. “It appealed both to the desire for security against nuclear war and to the belief in the superiority of American technological achievements.”

In a virtual summit with leaders of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland just three days after he regained the keys to the Oval Office in January, President Trump stunned the world when he revealed he had been in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss reductions in nuclear arms.

“We’d like to see denuclearization,” Trump said.

In one conversation with the Kremlin autocrat, Trump recounted, “We were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along.”

In apparently unscripted remarks, the returning commander-in-chief of the American armed forces said, “President Putin really liked the idea of — of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow. And China would have come along too.”

“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing,” Trump added.

“So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible. And I can tell you that President Putin wanted to do it. He and I wanted to do it. We had a good conversation with China. They would have been involved, and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet.”

President Trump did not disclose when the exploratory disarmament talks with Putin had taken place, or when they might resume.

Yet just four days after the Davos revelations on his role as an incipient nuclear peacekeeper, Trump launched his equally bombshell plan to construct a missile-destroying constellation of interceptors hundreds of kilometers above the Earth.

Persuading the Kremlin to join a radical disarmament agreement would represent a world-changing turnaround for the prospects for peace – one that might be rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize, says Alistair Burnett, head of media for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its pivotal role in promulgation of the International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

To advocates of worldwide nuclear disarmament, Trump’s potential role as an all-powerful envoy of atomic peace is a matter of extreme urgency.

The timekeepers who each year reset the Doomsday Clock – a symbolic atomic time bomb that ticks toward global nuclear annihilation at the stroke of midnight – recently placed its world-watched timepiece at just 89 seconds to the final super-explosions.

Three years into Russia’s blitzkrieg on democratic Ukraine, the leaders of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the clock to warn the world about nuclear battles that could end all intelligent life on Earth, lamented that Russia’s repeated threats to launch atomic missiles against the Free World powers aiding Kyiv are pushing the planet toward an all-out catastrophe.

Moscow’s endless rocket barrages on Ukraine “could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation,” say leaders of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded by Albert Einstein, the globe’s first superstar anti-nuclear activist, just months after the first, devastating atomic attacks on a civilian populace in Japan.

Russian “plans to place nuclear weapons in orbit,” and the lowering of its threshold for the use of atomic arms, they add, are all part of the Kremlin’s nuclear brinkmanship, and are speeding up the march toward destruction.

Elena Grossfeld, the expert on the quickening space arms race at King’s College London, says that Trump might have an array of targets in disclosing his proposed celestial shield in the early days of his new presidency.

“Russia has been threatening nuclear weapons use and claiming to have developed new weapon types,” and the countervailing Space Age missile defense project could be aimed at halting Putin’s belligerence or even pressuring him to enter talks on withdrawing his troops from Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Washington-based Secure World Foundation think tank, and author of the book American Missile Defense: A Guide to the Issues, says the U.S. Department of Defense faces a vast array of technological obstacles to building an orbital shield that could effectively halt a mass launch of nuclear missiles.

“The U.S. would need to have thousands of interceptors in orbit just to make sure that it had one in place to hit a launch,” Samson told me in an interview. And to destroy a missile immediately after launch, during its “boost phase,” the interceptor would have only “about 3-5 minutes for solid-fuel ICBMS.”

Another leading American space defense analyst says creating a shield in low Earth orbit against nuclear missiles would absolutely have to be accompanied by an offer to share this cutting-edge defense with other nuclear powers willing to scale back their stockpiles.

Without this defense sharing pledge, he says, rival powers could begin rapidly expanding their nuclear armaments to overcome the American shield, setting off a new-millennium atomic arms race.

Alistair Burnett, who is based at the headquarters of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Geneva, says: “President Trump has made no secret of his desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Committee has a track record of awarding it to those advocating nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, including both ICAN itself and last year’s winner, Nihon Hidankyo, not to mention Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.”

“If Trump were to forge an arms control agreement with the other nuclear powers, or achieve the denuclearization he talked about at the World Economic Forum, he would probably be a strong candidate for realizing his ambition to win the prize,” Burnett told me in an interview.

“If President Trump means what he has said about denuclearization, the most effective course of action is to engage the other nuclear-armed states around joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which half of all states have either already signed or ratified and which lays out a pathway under international law for eliminating nuclear weapons in a fair and verifiable way.”

The fate of the Earth that Trump hopes to avert – an all-out exchange of nuclear missiles – is a prospect so dark it is almost unimaginable, Burnett says: “Any use of nuclear weapons would rapidly escalate and cause an all out nuclear war that would have a devastating effect on the planet causing a nuclear winter and global famine which would affect all countries.”