US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US military had "successfully" tested the Golden Dome air defense system. US President Trump had promised to launch it in May 2025.
Points of attention
- The US has successfully tested the Golden Dome air defense system, which autonomously detects and destroys threats, including drones and cruise missiles.
- The launch of the Golden Dome is scheduled for May 2025, with the aim of protecting against ballistic missiles and other long-range threats.
The US successfully tested the “Golden Dome”
Pete Hegset reported this on the social network X.
Hegset said that "the Dynamic Defense Autonomous Defeat (DDAD) system autonomously detected, targeted, and destroyed a range of threats, including drones and cruise missiles."
I have seen our elite military integrate with next-generation technology to stop threats in their tracks.
He also stated that Golden Dome would become the "ultimate defense system" for the United States.
In May 2025, US President Donald Trump announced that he had approved the $175 billion Golden Dome missile defense shield project. The system is intended to protect the United States from ballistic missiles and other long-range threats, including potential nuclear missiles from Russia, North Korea, and China.
ScienceNews magazine collected comments from physicists about Trump's idea.
Frederick Lamb of the University of Illinois claims that there has never been a successful interception of a single intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with nuclear warheads (there have been some tests, but not in real conditions).
To do this, you need to deploy missile defense into space. But it's difficult to intercept a missile there, because in space, different objects of different masses move in exactly the same way.
And when an ICBM arcs back into the Earth's atmosphere, it takes less than a minute to reach its target. So, according to Lamb, the only way to intercept the missile in that case is to place interceptors very close to the point of impact.
Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation in Washington notes that while technology has advanced significantly, the laws of physics have not changed, and they will create an obstacle to such interceptions.
At the same time, some experts believe that the Dome's idea can be implemented - this is what Tom Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Robert Peters, an expert on nuclear deterrence and missile defense, said.
