Over 40 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, the most pro-science president of the 20th century, proposed a lot of bold initiatives. A Superconducting Super Collider was one goal, a big boost for government funding of basic research was another, and he also laid out a Strategic Defense Initiative. A missile defense system. That last one was dismissed by Democrats in Congress and media corporations as "Star Wars" fantasy.

Perhaps, like the SSC, it was fantasy that got sold to a man who believed in American ingenuity so much he would throw money at a lot of ideas if the joint confidence level was even 50%. Perhaps it just needed time. The James Webb Space Telescope was completed decades behind schedule and 900% over budget but it works. Cell phones in the 1980s were not great either but they are now, and we can only imagine how little hand-wringing there would be about climate change if President Clinton and Senator John Kerry had not made their fellow Boomer Environmentalists cheer by gutting nuclear energy in 1994.(1)

For all of its current nearly 80-year existence, Israel has been surrounded by hostile religious dictatorships bent on its destruction. Just this week, Iran responded to Israel preemptively bombing their planned nuclear weapons facility by launching missiles, and the Israeli missile defense system, the Iron Dome, stopped most of them. 

That is why President Donald Trump proposed a "Golden Dome" that would do the same in the US, not long after Communist China stated that Taiwan has until 2027 to be annexed or face invasion. When I was a military officer, the priority for Russian communists was nuclear weapons, then communications. Today, bad actors would target energy facilities, according to historian and electomagnetic pulse weapon expert Dr. William R. Forstchen, so a Golden Dome is a "no-brainer" because we're a long way removed from the 1980s, and certainly the 1940s, when it comes to isolated infrastructure. It's all a connected web. America has become a culture where rich people truly believe organic food and solar are viable and sustainable and only a Vast Corporate Conspiracy keeps modern technologies in place. 

The tenuous reality is far scarier.


Graphic: Lockheed-Martin

An EMP that took out energy production or the grid may have solar panel believers feeling comfortable because their coffee maker will still work, but they don't realize how everything else, from water to food production to shipping, would grind to a halt.

If the damage were not repaired and energy restored within a year, he believes, 80% of the American population would be gone. Is that just 1970s Paul Ehrlich/John Holdren "population bomb" hysteria? Maybe, but scientists at agricultural corporations were creating new ways to keep food plentiful and affordable by the 1970s, the need for Band Aid's 'Feed The World' song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" 40 years ago is unnecessary now.(2)

There has always been an arms race. The stirrup created real cavalry. The heavy crossbow changed the face of war so drastically that governments banned it. More recently, tanks brought true "total war" into existence and nuclear weapons made total destruction a possibility. A Golden Dome is needed because a nuclear blast and resulting Compton effect, a radiation discovery which earned Dr. Arthur Holly Compton the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927, would send out a gamma ray burst that turns hundred of thousands of miles of electrical wiring into antenna that would overload the grid in moments.

Forstchen is also the author of the best-selling thriller One Second After, which fictionalizes the real worry not enough people think about, and it's being turned into a movie written by J. Michael Straczynski (who's done everything from the Spider-Man comics to the World War Z film) starting this September. He believes a Golden Dome is essential.

The problem remains government. If we have a group like NASA or the CDC or EPA before 2019 in charge, it would take decades to get anything done. If we get the 2020 EPA after COVID-19, where Trump told them to take down costly bureaucratic walls because lives needed to be saved, then American ingenuity could put something together fast. Unless one defense contractor gets the entire thing, and we might get fiascoes like every ship, plane, and rifle development of the last 25 years. It is no longer 1983, a missile defense system no longer has to be science-fiction, and if the world is going to continue to move toward instability, it may be important to protect America from terror-exporting regimes intent on becoming nuclear powers.

When the James Webb Space Telescope was mired in delays and overruns, I said what NASA needed more than money was an actual James Webb, and to see a Golden Dome through, America may need to bypass the usual porkbarrel approach and find us a new Kelly Johnson to lead the program.

NOTES:

(1) Instead we got trillions of dollars of useless, expensive solar panels that have changed conventional energy share by 0.1%.

(2) Countries in Africa that have cast off European colonialism dictates about only using organic™ pesticides and legacy genetic modification like Mutagenesis are doing well feeding themselves. Even those still being bullied by white people in France are looking at the disaster in Sri Lanka when they catered to western environmentalists and worried that is their future.