In the early morning on August 6th, several hundred people gathered at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to commemorate the 80th anniversary of history’s first and so-far only one of two nuclear bomb attacks. The gathered, among them a handful of aged survivors, held a minute of silence at 8:15 to mark the precise moment when the 15-kiloton uranium bomb named Little Boy erased Hiroshima’s entire city center.

Among the 13 square kilometers (5 square miles) of rubble, some 70,000 people found instant death. Further tens of thousands perished in the following days from injuries and acute radiation sickness. In the decades that ensued, thousands of others succumbed to cancer, which they had developed due to long-term radiation effects. 

As recently as July 21st 2025, Vladimir Putin indicated that he'll consider a nuclear attack on Ukraine if he feels pressed to do so, according to Sky News. Putin’s frequent nuclear rhetoric has, for over three years, kept European nations from supporting Ukraine in a meaningful way, showing how impotent the world’s western militaries become when nukes are in play.

“These developments flagrantly disregard the lessons the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history,” Hiroshima’s mayor Kazumi Matsui commented at the memorial.

The nuclear bomb is humankind’s self-made Damocles Sword. Until today, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destructions remains the only brake holding nations back from unleashing a shared nuclear hell. It gambles on instincts of self preservation and the logic of strongmen. Few find comfort in this setup. 

Russia possesses the largest stockpile of warheads among all nuclear powers. According to estimates, the country may have more than 4,000 nuclear weapons available, followed by the U.S. with some 3,700 nukes. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal which currently stands at around 600 weapons. France and the UK have less than 600 nukes between them. Rising powers India and Pakistan have under 200 nuclear warheads each. Israel has about 90. Then there are the bullish upstarts North Korea and Iran, who have made significant leaps in their nuclear programs in recent years. Together with the geopolitical tensions, the risk of someone, somewhere taking the destructive first step are rising. And people around the world are rightfully asking whether there is anything that could be done to avert nuclear apocalypse. 

Donald Trump’s desire to find a technical solution to the nuclear annihilation threat was allegedly inspired by the reported 90% reliability of Israel’s Iron Dome. But many experts doubt that the Iron Dome concept could be scaled into an impenetrable shield protecting the entire U.S. from the most sophisticated threats. Iron Dome mostly takes down short-range rockets and artillery shells, frequently home-made by terrorists in Gaza. Golden Dome would be able to deflect cutting-edge glide bombs and supersonic and hypersonic ballistic missiles launched anytime, anywhere in the world by the best equipped militaries.

Unveiled only a week after Trump’s inauguration, Golden Dome is one of the most ambitious defense ventures in America’s history. According to information released by Reuters on August 12th, the system should consist of four layers including a constellation of satellites and a combination of ground-based short-range and long-range ballistic missile interceptors.

Companies including SpaceX and its Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman have been cited as the most likely providers of technology sub-systems for the shield. But so far, details are scarce.

The Trump administration has been silent on Golden Dome recently, despite the fact that the U.S. Congress in May authorized an initial $24.4 billion of funding for the development in its 2025 Reconciliation Bill.

At the 2025 Space and Missile Defense Symposium held August 5th to 7th, in Huntsville, Alabama, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth refused to discuss Golden Dome, according to media reports. The embargo surprised journalist. As the Atlantic stated, “Golden Dome is projected to cost gobs of money and [the Space and Missile Defense Symposium] is exactly the kind of place where the government can tell its story and get science, industry, and the military on the same page.”

Fred Lamb, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Illinois and arms control and disarmament expert, thinks that this silence is not a coincidence. 

“They don’t want people to be able to criticize it,” Lamb told Supercluster.

Lamb is one of many nuclear defense experts who think that Golden Dome has little chance to deliver on Trump’s promises and is likely to follow the fate of the Strategic Defense Initiative — an anti-nuke space shield project, also known under the mocking nickname Star Wars, studied in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Some space industry analysts, however, think that advances in space technology, including the reduction of launch and satellite production cost that have taken place since the Reagan era, may have changed the equation. More importantly, they see the project as a unique opportunity for the space industry. Supercluster reached out to several space industry experts to comment on Golden Dome’s feasibility but has not received a response, which is highly unusual.

Among those who think Golden Dome might actually work is former Space Development Agency (SDA) director Fred Kennedy. In an article published on the Aerospace America website in April, Kennedy argued that with advances in interceptor technology and small satellite manufacturing, a comprehensive space-based missile defense system looks “both feasible and practical.”

But Lamb, who chaired a 13-strong group of physicists that in 2022 compiled a 54-page report analyzing U.S. nuclear defense capabilities, thinks the concept stands against the constraints of fundamental physical feasibility. The 2022 report, commissioned by the American Physical Society, received an amendment this year, specifically addressing the Golden Dome project and its departure from reality. 

Co-authored by Lamb and Laura Grego, a former MIT researcher, now a research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the report amendment considers Golden Dome “technically infeasible” and likely to “waste hundreds of billions of dollars on inherently ineffective systems.”

“Currently, the U.S. has the ground-based mid-course defense system, which was designed to be helpful against small countries like North Korea, who represent a relatively primitive nuclear missile threat,” Lamb said. “But even North Korea has perfected its missile threat and it’s grown much larger. The Golden Dome, however, has been proposed to protect against any threat. Not just from those smaller countries, but also our peer adversaries like Russia and China.”

The report, referring to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office released earlier this year, states that to reliably intercept one or two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) fired by North Korea, would require a constellation of at least a thousand space-based interceptors, which would come at a cost of up to $542 billion. That is significantly more than the $175 billion price tag advertised by the Trump administration for the full-blown Golden Dome shield.

A nuclear war with Russia would certainly see the US warding off much more numerous nuke salvos and therefore requiring many more interceptors.

The orbiting interceptors, Lamb says, would target the incoming missiles during the boost-phase — the early powered flight stage immediately after launch when the nuclear warhead is still enclosed in the missile’s nose cone. But this stage is extremely short — four minutes at best — meaning any interceptor, whether space or ground-based, must be located within 500 kilometers (310 miles) of the launch site to have a chance of success, according to Lamb.

But satellites zoom around the planet at mind-boggling speeds of nearly eight kilometers per second. To have enough orbiting interceptors in place to shoot down every missile in every salvo fired from every possible launch site around the world every second of the day would require a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites. 

The report estimates that to take down a single salvo of ten ICBMs would require a constellation of at least 40,000 spacecraft.

“We found that to defend even against that kind of threat would require a trillion dollars just to build it and launch the system,” said Lamb. “We are not even talking about maintaining and replacing it.”

A shield against a full-scale nuke attack would need more than 150,000 satellites to be even remotely effective, said Lamb.

“If you have a nuclear war, even if only one warhead gets through, the consequences would be absolutely catastrophic,” Lamb said. “For this reason, you wouldn’t want to fire just one interceptor at each missile but at least four and with that, you quickly get into absolutely astronomical numbers of satellites.”

Fred Kennedy, on the other hand, believes that a modest constellation of around 300 satellites, each fitted with multiple interceptor rockets, could provide global coverage and decent, although not “entirely foolproof” defense. 

“A critic might argue that such a missile defense isn’t worth it because two nuclear missiles could still get through,” Kennedy wrote. “And I concede, this would indeed be a tragic day for the United States and humanity. But — crucially — it would not end humanity.”

He also argues that as the cost of space systems continues to decrease, the interceptor technology might soon become more affordable than the ballistic missiles carrying those nuclear warheads. 

Kennedy’s interceptors, however, due to their lower numbers, might be forced to target the incoming missiles not in the early boost phase but in the mid-course phase, which lasts up to 30 minutes and begins after the rocket detaches from the warhead.

The existing U.S. Ground-based Mid-Course Defense System has been developed to do just that using interceptors fired from silos at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Only a handful of tests of the system have been conducted so far in somewhat realistic conditions, Laura Grego, coauthor of the Golden Dome assessment, told Supercluster. Out of those tests, only about 50% were successful. 

Grego doubts a space-based nuke shield would primarily target missiles in the mid-course phase. Experts believe that any determined attacker would pack multiple decoy objects on every single missile together with the deadly nuclear warhead. That makes any deflection difficult as the defender must either attempt to shoot down every single object or find ways to reliably differentiate between the decoys and the warhead. In fact, the decoy problem prompted experts to consider a space-based nuke shield in the 1980s as they couldn’t find a solution to distinguish the decoys quickly and reliably. 

“Doing mid-course defense in space takes the worst of both worlds,” said Grego. “You’re putting yourself in space where it’s expensive and difficult and on top of that you have the decoy problem that we don’t know how to solve.”

None of the Ground-based Mid-Course Defense System tests conducted so far included decoys, said Grego. These tests focused solely on the mechanics of hitting one super fast object with another super fast object. 

“The decoy problem is the absolute challenge [in mid-course ballistic missile defense] and has been recognized since the 1960s,” said Grego. “These decoys can be relatively lightweight, and you can pack many of them.”

Sensors, such as radars and infrared detectors, might, theoretically, help distinguish the nuclear warhead from the empty cases, but concealment methods exist that a determined adversary could easily deploy to make the detection almost impossible. 

“They might include battery-operated heaters in the decoys to make them as warm as the warhead or they can conceal the warhead in a liquid nitrogen cooling jacket,” Grego said. 

Facing that many objects, the defenders might be inclined to try to shoot down all of them. But that creates another vulnerability — they could run out of available interceptors and have none at hand for the next incoming salvo.

“That’s part of the strategy,” said Grego. “To overwhelm the defense and force it to exhaust itself.”

Like many other experts, Grego and Lamb are concerned that the Golden Dome will likely prompt a nuclear arms race as adversaries will do all in their power to challenge America’s assumed untouchability.

“There is no technical possibility of building a successful defense system, but the adversary is always thinking about the worst case,” said Lamb. “They will start building more nuclear weapons and unfortunately, because the system is hardly going to be reliable, if anything goes wrong, more nuclear weapons will come through and the damage, death and destruction will be greater. It’s completely counterproductive.”

A space-based missile defense system could also likely be taken down by a nuclear detonation in space, something Russia is already thinking about.

Will we live with the Damocles Sword of Mutual Assured Destruction hanging over our heads?

“Almost anyone who studies nuclear weapons in a serious way eventually comes to the conclusion that while we need to manage the threat at the moment, the ultimate answer is that we can’t coexist with nuclear weapons in the long term,” said Grego. “A reliable technical fix is unlikely but nuclear deterrence is not a long-term strategy either because human beings are flawed. We simply need to disarm.”

As long as the U.S. administration remains tightlipped, experts will remain skeptical. There is not much time left to deliver on the lofty promises. Golden Dome is supposed to be fully operational by the end of Trump’s current presidential term.