President Trump has said he wants to create what he calls a national missile system “The Golden Dome for America”, to protect the US from foreign threats. But the plans are far from coming to fruition and would come with a heavy price tag. But China has already done it criticized the plan as a threat he says would increase the risks of militarizing space and fuel a global arms race.
The president said his administration had “selected an architecture” for the “state-of-the-art system,” which could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and put American weapons in space for the first time in history.
In January 2026, Mr. Trump said a frame the agreement he had reached with America’s NATO allies to defuse the conflict over his demands for the US to accept control of Greenland would include “a piece of” the Golden Dome being located on the vast arctic island.
Greenland is in a crucial location for US defense because any attack by America’s biggest adversaries, be it missiles, drones or ships, could be launched in the Arctic, which is the shortest route from Asia to the US East Coast.
What is the Golden Dome and how would it work?
The Golden Dome would be a multi-layered defense system that the president said would include “next-generation technologies” deployed on “land, sea and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors.”
“The Golden Dome will be able to intercept missiles even if they are launched from other parts of the world and even if they are launched from space,” the president said, adding that he wants it to be operational before the end of his second term.
The concept includes capabilities that would defend against missiles by detecting and destroying them before launch, intercepting them early in flight, stopping them mid-course and stopping them in the final moments of approaching a target.
The initiative would have multiple layers that would expand what the US already has and build new programs to counter the full range of air threats, according to Gen. Gregory Guillot, head of US Northern Command, who testified before Congress in April.
He described a defense layer that would go after the threats and then two other layers: “The first is an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) defeat layer, which mostly exists today with GBIs (ground-based interceptors) that can defeat a North Korean threat, and then an air layer that would defeat cruise missiles and aerial threats.”
“The time to intercept a missile is when it’s launched,” retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, CBS News contributor and former commander of US Central Command, told CBS News. He said that early in a missile’s flight, it is on a “very predictable” path, unable to maneuver or deploy radar spoofing systems, making this the ideal time to disable it.
“And to do that, you really have to go into space. You have to have a space-based system to do that,” McKenzie said. “It’s very possible. We looked at it at different times.”
McKenzie said he hopes “that’s where our thinking and our science will take us.”
“This will not be absent,” Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CBS News in an interview. “This will be well rooted in systems engineering and threat understanding and global architecture plans that have been in the works for a long time.”
Its. Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska, CBS News’ Margaret Brennan said in August 2025, that his state has long hosted key pieces of America’s national missile defense infrastructure and that he was working with the Pentagon to develop plans for the Golden Dome.
“We’ve got new threats. We’ve got hypersonics, we’ve got drones. We’ve got, heck, even we’ve seen spy balloons here in Alaska. What we need to do is to do the system enhancement with what’s called a layered defense, not just the ground system,” Sullivan said. “You’re working more with different systems, Aegis Ashore, THADD, and then you’re including space systems — both for tracking and interception — and you’re doing it with open architecture in terms of software to integrate those systems.”
How much will the Golden Dome cost?
The initiative, which will encompass many programs, will be built in states such as Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Alaska, according to Mr Trump, and involves several US defense and technology companies that have not yet been selected.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated a cost of $542 billion for the space components alone.
“Cost is definitely a deterrent,” McKenzie said. “But on the other hand, the ability to defend the United States against a nuclear attack, not necessarily a massive Russian attack, but, you know, an attack from North Korea, an attack from Iran, a potential attack from a country like Pakistan that is working on developing an ICBM. Those are all things that I think are feasible and I think are certainly worth the cost that it would take to operate the system.”
Aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin, which said X was ready to support the dome mission, described it as a “revolutionary concept”.
“This is a mission on the scale of the Manhattan Project, one that is both urgent and crucial to America’s security,” the company said.
Lockheed Martin Chief Operating Officer Frank St. John, said it would protect against nuclear missiles as well as intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles and other threats.
Mr Trump said US Space Force General Michael Guetlein would be responsible for overseeing the dome’s progress.
However, there is no funding yet to match the plan, which is “still in the conceptual stage,” Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told senators at a hearing in May 2025. The Pentagon is also still developing the requirements the dome will have to meet, the Associated Press reported.
The Iron Dome of Israel
The idea of the Golden Dome first came into the public light under Trump common address to Congress in March 2025 when he asked for funding for it.
“Israel has it, other places have it and the United States should have it too,” he said.
The president was referring to Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, which at least partially inspired the Golden Dome concept. The Israeli system, installed in 2011 to defend against incoming projectiles, largely addresses shorter-range threats such as missiles, while two other air defense systems work to defend against missiles.
Iron Dome, developed with US support, has intercepted thousands of rockets and has a 90 percent success rate, according to Israel.
China responds
China’s Foreign Ministry called on the US to “abandon the development and deployment of a global missile defense system as soon as possible.”
“The United States, following a ‘US first’ policy, is obsessed with seeking absolute security for itself,” a ministry spokesman said last year. “This violates the principle that the security of all countries should not be compromised and undermines global strategic balance and stability. China is seriously concerned about this.”
The spokesman added that the Golden Dome plan “increases the risk of space becoming a battlefield” and “fuels an arms race”.
“It’s kind of funny that the Chinese would talk about the militarization of space because I would guess they’ve done more work on the militarization of space than any other nation in the world,” McKenzie said. “I would say this is an inherently defensive system and it’s designed to protect the United States from attack.”
An assessment by the US Defense Intelligence Agency shows that the US military expects, over the next decade, to combat missile threats that are greater in “size and sophistication”. It also said that “China and Russia are developing a number of new delivery systems to exploit gaps in current US ballistic missile defenses.”
China has fast developed its missiles and other military capabilitieswhile deepening ties with Russia. The two nations said in a joint statement in 2025 that the dome project was “deeply destabilizing in nature” and would turn space into an “arena for armed confrontation”.
Karako said the Golden Dome initiative was “a belated realignment of US missile defense policy” to counter both China and Russia.
“I might [the Golden Dome] launch another spiral of offensive evolutions to try to break through?” McKenzie said. “It’s certainly possible. And I admit it’s a possibility. That said, I still think it’s a goal worth pursuing.”
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