China views President Donald Trump’s ambitious Golden Dome missile defense shield as destabilizing and threatening to China’s large missile forces, similar to the way the Strategic Defense Initiative triggered the Soviet Union’s concerns in the 1980s, according to a report by a U.S. Air Force think tank.
The Defense Department has reportedly scheduled the first major test for the nationwide strategic missile defense system covering the U.S. for late 2028.
“The initial responses in the People’s Republic of China to Golden Dome have been overwhelmingly negative, with Beijing raising both strategic and normative objections to the U.S. reviving its past efforts to build a strategic missile defense system,” the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute wrote in an Aug. 11 report, The Washington Times reported Tuesday.
The report stated that leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army are concerned about Golden Dome’s plans for “active launch suppression” — viewed by Beijing as a U.S. threat to conduct preemptive attacks on its nuclear missile forces, according to the Times.
Chinese officials have also criticized the Golden Dome as reflecting what the report said is a U.S. “Cold War mentality” — or anti-communist security policies. Chinese sources also “sometimes portray U.S. missile defense as a protection racket, with allies forced to pay in or suffer consequences,” the report stated.
The Golden Dome calls for an integrated air and missile defense system to be deployed by 2029, the Times reported. It will include a four-layer system of defenses against missiles, aircraft, and drones, according to government briefing slides disclosed by Reuters last week.
The layers include satellite-based weapons along with three land-based defense systems, including 11 short-range anti-missile batteries located in the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii.
The cost to build the system has been estimated at $175 billion, the Times reported. Congress approved the first $25 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law on July 4.
Senior Col. Wu Qian, spokesman for the Chinese Defense Ministry, said in February that the U.S. “does not need an ‘Iron Dome’ but must instead break through the ‘Iron Curtain’ imprisoning its own thinking,” the report stated.
“China urges the U.S. to jettison its Cold War mentality, stop exaggerating threats from other countries, and cease manufacturing military confrontation,” Wu said.
A Defense Intelligence Agency report made public in May identified threats posed by China’s large force of ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles as a key rationale behind Golden Dome, according to the Times.
The report stated that Chinese missile threats to the U.S. now and in 2035 include 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles increasing to 700; 72 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, growing to 132; 1,000 land attack cruise missiles increasing to 5,000; and 600 hypersonic missiles expanding to a force of 4,000.
China is building a space-based nuclear attack system called a fractional orbital bombardment system and is expected to field 60 of the systems by 2035. At the same time, China is also developing its own extensive system of strategic missile defenses involving missile interceptors, lasers, and cyber weapons.
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