The PLA’s Liberation Daily targeted the Trump Administration’s “Golden Dome” project as an “obsession” with absolute security and a move to militarize space, in an article today. The article stressed, in particular, the Pentagon’s attempts to deploy “proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept,” meaning orbiting spacecraft designed to destroy missile threats mid-flight, reported South China Morning Post today.
The article reported that the program, “blurring lines between civilian and military space activities,” would increase global security risks. “By militarizing space and prioritizing dominance, the U.S. violates peaceful-use principles enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty,” wrote Liberation Daily, referring to the 1967 treaty signed by both the United States and the Soviet Union. It also pointed to the fact that strikes considered under the Golden Dome could create the type of cascading debris scenario that would severely impede peaceful and practical space activities.
While U.S. President Donald Trump often refers to his “Golden Dome” project by referring to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of 1983, trying to enshrine it in a Reaganesque mantle, it should be clearly understood that President Reagan proposed SDI as a joint, and even collaborative “open laboratory” program, which deployment, if the needed technology were developed, would be regulated by a solemn treaty negotiated between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Reagan was keenly aware of the fact that were the U.S. to proceed unilaterally, as Trump clearly intends to do, it would be perceived as a real threat to the Soviet Union and could lead to nuclear war. The Soviet leadership generally never took Reagan’s clearly enunciated intention seriously by Moscow, whose missile defense program was far more advanced than anything the U.S. was doing at the time, and Gorbachev wanted to keep it that way in order to maintain their first-strike capability. The Trump initiative can only be seen as an attempt to do what the Soviets had claimed Reagan wanted to do, and pinning a “Star Wars” label on this one is certainly no misnomer. At the very least, it will lead to a space arms race.
