Does the Golden Dome Create Strategic Instability or an Opportunity with China and Russia?

Will the Golden Dome, the Trump administration’s proposed national missile shield, start a new nuclear or outer space arms race, destabilize the balance between the major global powers, and exacerbate strategic instability? Beijing has asserted the initiative will weaken “global strategic balance and stability,” as well as turn “space into a war zone,” and Moscow has called it a “very destabilizing initiative” that would “[undermine] strategic stability at its core.” Meanwhile, for years, Moscow and Beijing have been tilting the scales to their strategic advantage, expanding their nuclear and missile forces and strengthening their military space power. The United States cannot ignore this threat and should anchor U.S. security on superiority, rather than hope that China and Russia would suddenly end initiatives to improve and expand their strategic forces. While the administration should strive for greater transparency with Congress and the American people on significant questions regarding costs and plans, and pursue deeper coordination with international partners, the Golden Dome and strong missile defenses will provide the United States a valuable security edge, a new tool for strategic deterrence, and a path to preserve peace.

The challenge in refuting arguments about the impact of the Golden Dome on strategic stability and its potential to spark an arms race—a nuclear arms race or arms race in outer space—is that both “strategic stability” and “arms race” are terms without agreed-upon definitions and are impossible to objectively measure. If the litmus test for strategic stability was whether anyone was engaged in a full-scale nuclear war, then yes, the world is basking in a period of strategic stability. But if strategic stability is when nuclear-armed states neither feel compelled to use their nuclear weapons first nor feel the need to increase the size of their nuclear forces—this is a common definition of strategic stability—one arrives at a different conclusion. The United States must sensibly modernize its nuclear forces. By contrast, China and Russia are actively expanding their strategic arsenals with new and novel capabilities. Since 2020, China has tripled the size of its nuclear arsenal, improved the quality of its nuclear weapons, and expanded its military footprint in outer space. Russia is fielding new nuclear weapons systems, including hypersonic ones, a nuclear-powered cruise missile, and a nuclear-armed torpedo. But stability hinges on more than just nuclear weapons. Beyond nukes, China and Russia are also aggressively developing and expanding new tools in the space, cyber, information, and irregular warfare spaces, accelerated by AI, quantum, and other emerging technologies, to undermine U.S. and allied interests and ability to achieve their operational objectives —there is no sign they seek balance.

This strategic landscape poses new threats to the United States and its allies. A 2023 report by a bipartisan congressionally appointed commission to look at U.S. strategic posture noted that “the risk of military conflict with either or both Russia and China, while not inevitable, has grown, and with it the risk of nuclear use, possibly against the U.S. homeland.” In combination with a modernized U.S. nuclear deterrent, the Golden Dome is a reasonable response to safeguard the United States and its people from both nuclear and nonnuclear missiles and other airborne threats. The Golden Dome, moreover, is an evolutionary and not revolutionary step forward, as it builds upon decades-long efforts, spanning administrations from both political parties, to improve national defenses against missile attacks. Coincidentally, Russia and China have the same idea and have been steadily building their own Golden Domes, seeking to fortify their frontiers with anti-access, area denial air defense weapon systems.

To concerns that the Golden Dome, specifically its proposed space-based missile interceptors, could provoke an arms race in outer space, however that is defined, consider what China and Russia are already doing—and have been doing so for decades, while hypocritically calling for a treaty to prohibit weapons and the use of force in space. The Soviet Union was the first nation to put a weapon in space, building satellites capable of attacking other satellites in the 1960s, and developing the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) designed to deliver a warhead from orbit. China, too, is developing space weapons, testing a FOBS in 2021, and demonstrating space technologies with military applications. With or without the Golden Dome—a system that could be designed to protect the homeland from FOBS and other space threats—there is every sign that China and Russia will continue to develop these types of capabilities. Some also point out that Beijing and Moscow will criticize space-based missile interceptors because they could be used for offensive and not only defensive purposes. But this is true of any missile defense technology—and any weapon at all. How a weapon is used mainly determines whether it is defensive or offensive. For new technologies, it raises the imperative for all parties to make intentions clear through public and private messaging and ideally through a commitment to strategic stability talks. But even without space-based interceptors, there is every reason to believe Beijing and Moscow would still object to U.S. efforts to build strong homeland missile defenses, arguing it undermines stability, as both China and Russia have consistently argued in the past.

While it is hard to imagine Beijing or Moscow deciding to launch a massive nuclear first strike in response to the decision to build the Golden Dome, China and Russia may try to develop weapons to counter the missile shield to improve the security of their second-strike capability. But this is not a good reason to oppose the Golden Dome. Historically, military innovations have led to cat-and-mouse developments, as one side attempts to blunt the advantages derived by the other and compel widespread adoption of new capabilities. In 1916, the British deployed the first tank in battle, but within two decades, all the major powers fielded them. The United States pioneered stealth technology, but many nations now operate stealth aircraft. And there should be no doubt that China and Russia are trying to develop new weapons and technologies to defeat U.S. stealth fighters and bombers—but that does not mean the United States should give up on stealth. The United States should pursue asymmetric capabilities and concepts to gain advantages.

The main problem with the notion of strategic stability is that it assumes all sides want some type of balance or parity. There is no sign that Beijing is interested in balance—the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants economic and military dominance. China views itself as a rising power and not one comfortable with maintaining the status quo. Beijing has made its intentions for both Taiwan and the South China Sea plainly clear. Russia is also not happy with the global order. Moscow started a war in Ukraine to pursue its revanchist views of Russia’s place in Europe—Russia wants to upset whatever balance exists today. Because of this, the global geopolitical landscape today looks like the early twentieth century, when the German Empire sought to challenge the global position of the British Empire, and the 1930s, as Japan expanded across the Indo-Pacific region at the expense of the Western powers. Like today, no amount of diplomacy or appeasement could conceal the fact that certain nations rejected balance, and that “stability” was an illusion.

In these circumstances, a facade of strategic balance or parity does not aid U.S. security. As General Earle Wheeler, who served as Army chief of staff from 1962 to 1964, noted, “I know of no way to design parity of military power. It certainly is contrary to any military precept that I know of, because you try to design superiority.” In the case of the Golden Dome, that superiority would come from defense and not, as with China and Russia, offensive weapons. Ironically, it was Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967 who argued that missile defense was more moral than offensive nuclear weapons, rhetorically asking which was “more conducive to peace, a country which based itself on offensive or defensive systems?” In combination with other modernized systems and capabilities, the Golden Dome would provide a level of superiority, based on a strong defense, and military edge over potential adversaries that will aid deterrence and add a new protection should anyone start shooting missiles at the U.S. homeland.

While strengthening homeland defenses against missile and other airborne threats is a good idea, some alterations could make the Golden Dome better. There is a need for more transparency about Golden Dome plans and investments with Congress and the U.S. public, given significant questions on forecasted costs and technical feasibility. For the Golden Dome to endure, it requires an intergenerational commitment and must survive repeated four-year political cycles. Transparency aims to broaden and strengthen support for the initiative, so that rather than being viewed as a partisan priority—a perception that has haunted missile defense in the past—the Golden Dome is viewed as a nonpartisan national priority, one shared by allies. To enable greater transparency, the U.S. administration should include a delineation of the role of the Golden Dome and the role of the U.S. nuclear deterrent in deterring and defending against PRC and Russian strategic threats in forthcoming U.S. defense strategy, missile defense, and nuclear posture review documents.

Coordination and consultation with allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region on Golden Dome and other strategic issues is critical in developing a harmonized approach to addressing adversarial threats–including burden-sharing opportunities for co-development and coproduction. Canada has a clear stake in the defense of North America and, building on nearly 70 years of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operations, could be incentivized to contribute elements of Golden Dome’s development. Similarly, Japan and Israel could offer co-development and coproduction opportunities, deriving cost savings, boosting innovation, and enhancing collective security.

The Golden Dome should prompt opportunities to update and reinitiate arms control discussions or reframe and extend existing agreements with Russia to match today’s strategic and geopolitical realities. There may also be a chance to develop a new dialogue with Russia and China on building crisis management mechanisms, like those developed between U.S. and Soviet leaders during the Cold War, or start new dialogues that aim to develop an agreed-upon definition and approach for strategic stability, which could precede deeper arms control discussions. If new agreements are negotiated bilaterally with Russia and China, they should be coordinated with U.S. allies and undergo comprehensive whole-of-government assessments to properly assess their full impacts on U.S. national and economic security.

In a 1946 speech, Winston Churchill spoke about the perils of trusting a “quivering, precarious balance of power” as a guarantee for security, arguing that the United States and its allies “cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength.” Though publicly articulating worries about global peace and security, it’s more likely that China and Russia truly fear that the Golden Dome—just as the demons fear the Golden Honmoon—would give the United States an edge. Accordingly, the Golden Dome has the potential to strengthen deterrence and widen the margins on which Churchill argued the democracies should base their security. The Golden Dome could end up helping to reduce the chances of nuclear war should it help restart arms control, strategic stability, and crisis management discussions between the United States, Russia, and China.

There are still important questions about the overall cost, scope, and scale of the Golden Dome, relative to other administration priorities, such as strengthening deterrence and homeland defense (e.g., nuclear modernization and shipbuilding), that should be addressed in partnership with Congress and international allies. And the technology to enable the full scope of Golden Dome’s ambition, particularly space-based interceptors, will need to be proven out to justify the costs. However, strengthening missile defenses would give the United States an edge and help protect it from increasing missile threats. It might deter China or Russia from taking some hostile act against the United States or its allies, possibly preventing war. That the Golden Dome might be one more reason for Putin and Xi to wake up and decide that “today is not that day,” preserving peace for yet another rotation of the Earth around the sun, is a strong reason to pursue its development.

Clayton Swope is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Melissa Dalton is a senior adviser (non-resident) with the Defense Budget Analysis Program and the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. She previously served as the under secretary of the U.S. Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs.