U.S. President Donald Trump has previously said Canada will either have to pay US$61-billion to join Golden Dome, or be annexed.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian.
Golden Dome is back in the news, albeit in an unusual way.
It’s not because Russia or China are building new intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, but because U.S. President Donald Trump worked himself into a corner promising he’d acquire Greenland one way or another, and the inevitable result was economic turmoil, the possible end of NATO, and Prime Minister Mark Carney telling the world the Pax Americana is effectively over.
After walking back his Greenland threats last week, Mr. Trump said the deal he had come to involves extending the Golden Dome to the island.
He also mentioned Golden Dome will be defending Canada, which is surprising because it’s nothing more than a concept. But that wasn’t nearly as surprising as finding out that the Canadian military is inexplicably still working with the Americans on its development, as reported by The Globe and Mail in a story about how the Canadian military has modelled a potential response to an American invasion.
Opinion: Canada should firmly reject Trump’s ludicrous Golden Dome plan
Leaving aside the question of whether it is wise for a country threatened with annexation to continue collaborating on joint defence projects with the potential aggressor (it isn’t), the fact remains that Golden Dome is neither an effective deterrent nor a good use of our money.
Mr. Trump has previously said Canada would either pay US$61-billion to join Golden Dome, or be annexed.
For roughly the same amount of money, Canada could build several hundred Gripen NG fighter aircraft, as well as all the new airbases, trainers, munitions, radar sites and support aircraft needed to ensure no one ever questions our sovereignty ever again. The added advantage is that we would retain a far greater amount of the economic benefit as much as win back some much needed political, military and economic sovereignty from the Americans. The idea has merit, and has been recommended by experts.
This will not happen with Golden Dome, which is supposed to involve exceptionally sophisticated ground-based interception missiles, and as much as potentially tens of thousands of missile-armed satellites. It is highly unlikely Canada would play a prominent role in the system’s development, nor substantially benefit economically.
Golden Dome signals change to Canada’s long-time opposition to joining U.S. missile defence
Back in the late 1950s, the first attempt at developing an integrated continental defence scheme between Canada and the U.S. resulted in the construction of American radars, the acquisition of American fighters and the deployment of American missiles, all of which were obsolete within a decade. In return, we got the right to build and staff the radar and missile stations, a political crisis over nuclear weapons and the termination of the Avro Arrow.
The important parallel to consider is that this first effort to build a defence against the Soviet Union’s strategic weapons neither benefited our economy nor did anything to slow down the arms race. Just the opposite occurred, and while the U.S. and Soviet Union nearly bankrupted themselves building ICBMs, junior partners such as Canada were left holding the bag with equipment that was outdated not long after it became operational.
Superpowers commanding global economies might be able to absorb that level of unproductive military spending, but Canada cannot. If we’re going to spend considerable public money to ensure against threats to our sovereignty, the economic benefit has to be real, immediate and serve Canadians first.
That said, we might reconsider the basic economics of anti-ballistic missile defence shields.
Ensuring our side has enough interceptor missiles to engage and defeat every one of the other side’s warheads quickly becomes an impossible task: The defending side would have to build and maintain several times as many interceptors than the enemy’s warheads, and it’s always cheaper for the enemy to build more missiles and warheads than what it costs to defend against them.
Canada has been working for years to prepare for Golden Dome, Air Force general says
And that’s just ground-based interceptors, the most sophisticated of which have an at-best 50 per cent success rate, and only during scripted tests operating in the most ideal of circumstances.
Golden Dome proposes to do this and develop tens of thousands of armed satellites as well. It could cost US$3.6-trillion, and critics argue it’s effectively a giant corporate welfare program.
Even the name is a misnomer, an allusion to Israel’s Iron Dome, a system that’s only useful against unsophisticated drones and slow-moving rockets, none of which carry nuclear warheads. Of greater concern, it would result in both the militarization of space (breaking a nearly 60-year-old international agreement that Canada, the U.S., Russia and China are all parties to), and invariably result in a new weapons race, one most experts agree would result in disaster.
This is not a sensible path forward to bring about world peace, but the machinations of a cartoon supervillain.