Canada’s connection to US ballistic missile defence efforts goes back a long way and is interwoven with our shared history of continental air defence.
Now, Trump is proposing a ‘Golden Dome’ to supposedly make America safer from foreign threats, and Canada is part of the discussions.
Recently, the American Physical Society released a detailed free report: “Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense: Challenges to Defending the U.S.”
The basic weaknesses of the whole concept are simple to understand: it takes drastically more expense and hardware to (possibly) stop one missile than it does for a challenger to build one more missile. As a result, the technology is inherently likely to fuel arms races, as foreign challengers fear their deterrents will lose credibility.
Related:
- Open thread: ballistic missile defence
- Obama changing tack on missile defence
- Robert Gates posturing on missile defence
- Canada and Ballistic Missile Defence
- US security assurances and nuclear weapon proliferation
- Open thread: the global nuclear arms race
- Blair on the fragility of nuclear deterrence
- Consequences of nuclear weapon proliferation
- The military importance of space
- The nuclear razor’s edge
- Unproductive investments that harm the world
- Experiential education on nuclear weapon proliferation
See also my 2005 report: “Common Threats, Joint Responses: The Report of the 2005 North American Security Cooperation Assessment Student Tour“
Bad news for Trump’s Golden Dome: He can’t build it without Canada
The president would have to rely on his “51st state” to track Chinese and Russian missiles that could come at the U.S. from over the horizon.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/23/trump-canada-golden-dome-00366410
Is Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ more fantasy than reality?
Donald Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ is a proposed defense program that will feature the use of space lasers, satellites and interceptors designed to provide 24/7 space based defence. It’s advertised as a bulwark against missiles and nuclear attacks from the likes of China, North Korea and Russia.
Mike Stone is a Reuters reporter covering the U.S. arms trade and defense industry and joins the show to discuss Donald Trump’s trillion dollar sci-fi inspired project, Canada’s potential involvement, and its implications for the global arms race.
For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts
The problem with Mr Trump’s plan is that it is still unclear what Golden Dome is supposed to do. Will it modestly improve America’s ability to shoot down drones and handfuls of conventional cruise missiles fired by China towards military bases in the continental United States during a war over Taiwan? Will it parry small salvos of warheads launched by a second-tier nuclear power like North Korea? Or will it block hundreds of Russian and Chinese warheads in a full-blown nuclear exchange, neutralising their ability to threaten America’s existence?
The answers to these questions matter greatly. Experts calculate that a smallish Golden Dome, focused on parrying small incoming salvos, might cost just over $250bn over 20 years, a modest sum by the standards of America’s annual defence spending. But a full-fat version with tens of thousands of SBIs in orbit—a key factor driving up cost—could run to $3.6trn, a vast sum that would cannibalise America’s armed forces. That would not only be wasteful, but it might also induce adversaries to expand their own arsenals more than they otherwise would. A degree of mutual vulnerability is an inherent part of stable nuclear deterrence.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/11/06/americas-plans-for-a-golden-dome-are-dangerously-obscure
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.
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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 defense policy is not about reality—or the best intelligence estimates about it—but instead a matter of domestic politics, history, and mythology.”
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Finally, even if cost-effective BMD were possible, adversaries would not accept it. They would move to defeat it. They would grow their stockpiles and develop missiles with unconventional trajectories, more sophisticated cruise missiles, or ways of clandestinely smuggling nuclear weapons onto enemy territory. A missile shield that renders an adversary’s nuclear arsenal useless won’t be seen by the other side as defence but as an act of aggression. It eliminates their deterrent, leaving them exposed. As Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy analyst, put it in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, “if tomorrow we woke up and read in the papers that Xi Jinping had just authorized a Golden Dome for China that would render the US’s ability to hit China with nuclear weapons moot, the US would not see that as a defensive measure being taken by China.”
An impervious Golden Dome, as Trump imagines it—absolute protection against all doomsday missiles, including cruise and hypersonic ones—would drive the nuclear arms race in new, dangerous directions.
https://thewalrus.ca/golden-dome/