America
Golden Dome a No-Brainer
Expert says Trump’s missile defense system is long overdue.
W BY VAN CHARLES
illiam r. forstchen could only laugh. Seemingly within hours of President
Donald Trump’s announcement that he wants to build a Golden Dome missile
defense system, critics panned the idea as ineffective. One went so far as to call the idea a “poster child for
waste” and predicted it would take nearly 10,000 intercept rockets orbiting the Earth on satellites to be effective. “This 10,000 missiles thing is absurd,” said Forstchen, a world-renowned expert in electromagnetic pulse weapons with a Ph.D. from Purdue University, and the author of 50 books.
“That’s just crazy. It’s not going to take 10,000 satellites.
It will take 20 or 30,” he told Newsmax. Forstchen, who has lectured to numerous groups about
EMPs including the FBI, the Army War College, and NASA, said critics of Trump’s Golden Dome proposal sim- ply don’t understand its intended use. “We’re not talking about preventing a massive nuclear
strike,” said Forstchen, a history professor at Montreat Col- lege in North Carolina. “It’s the Third World players and rogue crazies I worry about, the ones that can launch three missiles and do it effectively. “The Golden Dome
would easily shoot those systems down.” Trump called for the cre-
ation of a Golden Dome in May, saying it will deploy “next-generation technolo- gies across the land, sea, and space, including space- based sensors and intercep- tors.”
The Golden Dome,
WARNING William Forstchen, shown on the set of a movie based on one of his books, believes the U.S. should have built a Golden Dome years ago. “We’ve been running naked for the last 40 years,” he says.
32 NEWSMAX | SEPTEMBER 2025
Trump said, “will be capa- ble of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.” He
added that he hopes the system, which he estimated will cost around $175 billion, will be in place by the time he leaves office. Skepticism as to cost and effectiveness notwithstanding, Forstchen said the U.S. is woefully late in building its own version of Israel’s Iron Dome, which has been exceptionally effective in thwarting close-range missile attacks. The Golden Dome, he said, is like the Iron Dome on
steroids. “We are very, very, very overdue,” he said. “We’ve had
some anti-ballistic missiles coming out of the [Reagan administration’s] Star Wars initiative that were positioned in Alaska, but that was old technology, and the success rate would be 25%, at best. “So, we’ve been running naked for the last 40 years.” Trump’s $175 billion estimate to have the Golden Dome operational has been the subject of considerable debate, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) earlier this year released a range of cost estimates. To deploy a system designed to thwart an attack of sev-
eral missiles from North Korea, CBO estimated the cost would be $161 billion over the next 20 years. The cost to defend against larger nuclear powers such as
Russia or China would be around $542 billion. Forstchen said given the money the federal government
spends on far less critical projects, the price tag quickly becomes irrelevant.
TRUMP/CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
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