Star wars returns

“Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago,” declared US President Donald Trump, “but they didn’t have the technology.” Now, he said, America could finally build a “cutting-edge missile defence shield”. Mr Trump’s Golden Dome – an allusion to Israel’s more modest Iron Dome – is intended to protect America from attack using, among other things, hundreds or thousands of satellites that can both track and attack enemy missiles as they take off.

Mr Trump had promised such a shield on the campaign trail. On May 20 he said his “big, beautiful” tax Bill, which has not yet been approved by Congress, included US$25 billion (S$32.2 billion) in initial funding and that the project would cost US$175 billion in total. In practice, the Golden Dome will probably cost far more – the Congressional Budget Office reckons the bill could run to more than US$500 billion over 20 years – and take far longer than Mr Trump’s wildly optimistic timeline of “two-and-a-half to three years”.