Golden Dome - A Scientific and Technical AssessmentAbstract: In May 2025, President Trump approved the Defense Department’s architecture and implementation plan for “Golden Dome”—a multilayered defense system with ground-, sea-, and space-based components intended to protect the United States and its allies and their armed forces against attack by aircraft, ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, cruise missiles, and drones fired at anytime from anywhere by any adversary, including peer and near-peer adversaries.
This goal is clearly beyond reach anytime soon. Even attempting to create such a system would cost hundreds of billions of dollars or more and have other serious consequences.Bio:Frederick Lamb is a Research Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, the Brand and Monica Fortner Chair of Theoretical Astrophysics Emeritus, and a core faculty member in the Program in Arms Control and Domestic & International Security at the University of Illinois.
An expert on space policy, ballistic missiles and missile defenses, and the technical aspects of nuclear test bans, he has been a consultant to the U.S. Defense Department, U.S. national laboratories, and numerous Congressional committees.
He co-chaired the American Physical Society’s 2003 study of Boost-Phase Missile Defense and chaired its 2025 study of Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense. The current focus of his scientific research is high-energy and relativistic astrophysics and dense matter.
He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Among other awards, he shared the 2005 Leo Szilard Award of the APS for his leadership of the 2003 study of missile defense and the 2022 Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society for his contributions to the success of NASA’s NICER X-ray astronomy mission.
Among many other leadership positions, he has served in the leadership line of the APS Forum on Physics and Society and has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction since its founding.