The nuclear weapons thriller “A House of Dynamite,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow, depicts the catastrophic failure of U.S. anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down a long-range nuclear-armed missile, fired by unidentified assailants in the eastern Pacific, which is honing in on Chicago. In the film, two “ground-based interceptors” (GBIs) are fired at the terror-inducing missile, but one misfires and the other just misses. After the Secretary of Defense is depicted claiming that the success rate of the GBIs is “61 percent,” he cries out: “Fifty billion dollars only buys us a coin toss!?” As bad as that is, the statement is doubly misleading here: the cost of antimissile defense systems all told is at least eight times $50 billion, and the success rate in missile shoot-down tests is far worse than 61 percent, so much worse that the Bush administration ordered the program’s test results be kept secret after 2002.1
In 1999, the New York Times noted that, “After decades of flops, $100 billion in costs and sharp rises in political stakes, the Pentagon is trying again to defend the U.S. against missile attack.”2 Later that year the Times reported that, “The Pentagon has spent about $55 billion on missile defense since 1983 and nearly $100 billion over the last four decades, with relatively little to show for it.”3 By 2000, the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments estimated that $130 billion had been spent on “Star Wars,”4 but without a demonstrably workable system.
In 2012, the New York Times reported that “more than $200 billion” had been spent “devising ways to hit incoming enemy warheads,”5 and in 2013 it noted that one estimate was up to $250 billion.6 Likewise, the Arms Control Association reported in January 2025 that Congress has appropriated over $250 billion for the Missile Defense Agency’s programs between 1985 and 2023. That number was based on Missile Defense Agency (MDA) estimates and the legislative record, but that total doesn’t include tens of billions of additional dollars spent since work on antimissile systems first began in the 1950s.7 Gabe Murphy, reviewing “A House of Dynamite” November 2 in The Hill, reported that, “Between 1957 and 2021, the U.S. spent over $400 billion in a vain effort to defend the nation against ballistic missile threats.”8 Murphy also noted that “arms control experts have lauded the movie as a timely portrayal of the … the fallacy that missile defense can effectively protect us from them.”
Today’s ballistic missile defense program, or BMD, is promoted as a version of the 1983 impossible “Star Wars” mission of Ronald Reagan. BMD, today dubbed Golden Dome in the gilded Trump iteration, is a complex of early warning satellites, rockets, interceptors, and radars.9 Swimming in billions of tax dollars, the missile industry contractors must chuckle at the new name brand, and the refashioned stationary; they just call it the Golden Goose.
Yet the list of the program’s critics grows every day, and its decades-long string of test failures should have long since proven the Republican Party’s adage that there are some problems you can’t solve by throwing money at them. Still, the contractors are such lavish campaign contributors, the scam is winked at by both major parties and routinely wins unfathomable funding increases.
The gigantic swindle is being funded exorbitantly under the newly minted nick name “golden” in spite of long-standing, high-level allegations of official fraud, cover-up, insurmountable technical problems, harsh international criticism, and a complete lack of military rationale.
Failure, fraud, abuse In June 2004, fifty-three House Democrats asked the FBI to investigate the antimissile program for “serious allegations of fraud and cover-up.” The allegations were based on evidence collected by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Theodore A. “Ted” Postol, formerly a top Navy science advisor in the Reagan Administration. Dr. Postol’s allegations were made after the Pentagon classified as “secret” his May 11, 2000 letter to John D. Podesta, the White House chief of staff, in which he described a major flaw in the program.
Postol’s letter charged that flight test data from a June 1997 test showed that an interceptor missile could not distinguish incoming weapons from swarms of decoys. The Pentagon then conspired, Postol alleges, to hide this devastating test result.10 In a second letter to Mr. Podesta, Dr. Postol charged that the Pentagon’s BMD organization “is most likely attempting to illegally use the security and classification system to hide waste, fraud, and abuse.”11
Postol’s excoriating letter was based on the work of Dr. Nira Schwartz, a former engineer at the giant weapons merchant TRW, who first exposed the fraud in a lawsuit against the company.12 Dr. Schwartz claimed that TRW faked results of BMD tests as well as reviews of computer programs, and “fired her when she protested.” TRW had denied her accusations.13
Postol told the New York Times that BMD officials were “systematically lying about the performance of a weapons system that is supposed to defend the people of the U.S. from nuclear attack… They’ve been caught in one outright lie after another.”14 Then as if to prove his point, the Pentagon sent Defense Security Service agents to his office with classified documents they said he should read. “I definitely saw this as potential for entrapment and intimidation,” Postol said.
Postol and others called the visit a ploy the government has used before to silence informed dissidents. If Postol had agreed to read the letter, he said, he would be obliged not to talk about its contents, even if they were identical to his previously published work. Jennifer Weeks at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government told the Boston Globe, “I think it’s plausible this was an effort to silence him.”15
Skullduggery has hounded the program from its beginnings. Congressional investigators found (years after the fact) that two “positive” tests of antimissile systems in 1984 and 1991 had been rigged. The tests — of a forerunner antimissile program — failed all 16 times.16In May 2010, Dr. Postol and George N. Lewis published a paper showing that while the Pentagon claimed an 84 percent interception success rate, the antimissile warheads worked only 10 to 20 percent of the time.17 “I gave them evidence of fraud at the Pentagon,” Postol said. “In fact, they should turn it over to the FBI in my opinion.”18
Technical problems Many of the world’s top scientists have declared the antimissile plans unfeasible. In April, a report by the MIT Security Studies Program and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said the system would not work and that, “It makes no sense to begin deployment.”
In July 2000, fifty (50) Nobel laureates in science (half of the living science winners) — the biggest group of Nobel Prize winners ever to make such a joint appeal — signed a scathing letter to Clinton, saying that BMD offered “little protection and would do grave harm” to national security after finding that foes could outwit or overwhelm any such attempt at defense.19
The next day, the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists with 42,000 members, along with the Federation of American Scientists, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, jointly urged Mr. Clinton to cancel the program regardless of what test results show.20
The non-partisan Government Accounting Office warned of unsolved problems caused by decoy warheads nullifying the defenses, as well as the fact that testing can never duplicate actual wartime conditions. Even Larry Welch, a retired four-star USAF General, authored two Pentagon-sponsored reports to Congress acknowledging the failure of U.S. test interceptors to distinguish decoys ⸺ although he used the failed mission to argue for more funding.
The system’s notorious failure rate is so bad that in June 2002, the Bush Administration took the anti-democratic and authoritarian step of declaring BMD’s test results secret. The Los Angeles Times reported that critics have often used Pentagon data from the tests “to challenge whether the experiments were as successful as claimed,” and argue that the new secrecy could see the Pentagon “spend tens of billions of dollars on a national antimissile system that doesn’t work ….”21
Was the Pentagon given Congress’s war powers? Could a computerized launch-on-warning antimissile system usurp control of military action unto itself? This question is raised not just by critics, but by technology-dependent BMD models. David Wood in the Seattle Times writes that the cherished Constitutional principle that elected civilian leaders are in charge of the military — especially in wartime — “would be overturned by the proposed missile-defense system, which would have to react so quickly to the threat of incoming warheads that its military operators would make the decision to fire.”
The usurpation of war power by generals in U.S. Space Command — or by computers — is taken for granted by proponents of BMD. Vice Adm. Herbert Browne, deputy commander at Space Command, told the Seattle Times, “There’s not enough time to call back and say, ‘Can I shoot?’ Therefore, that decision would fall to the Space Command chief, currently USAF General Stephen N. Whiting. “Later the President would learn from a phone call that the country had gone to war.” Of course this is flatly unconstitutional.
“There’s going to have to be special trust and confidence placed in the hands of the CINC,” Adm. Browne said, using the acronym not for the White House but for Commander in Chief of Space Command.”
International opposition “Virtually all the principal American allies in Europe and Asia oppose the missile defense system. They argue that its efficacy is unproven…” New York Times reported. “European allies…argue against the … system because it would kill the ABM treaty, which they view as a cornerstone of arms control.”
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies condemned missile defense in its 2000-2001Strategic Survey, May 1, 2001. “The U.S. has had little success in convincing its European critics that its plans for NMD [national missile defense] deployment are needed, sensible or useful … [and] many do not believe the system will ever work as intended,” the report said. In February 2001, a group of European leaders at the Munich Security Conference urged the United States to abandon the antimissile system.22
In November 1999, a UN committee voted 54 to 7 to oppose any new missile system that “attempts to undermine or circumvent the ABM treaty.” All the members of the European Union either voted for the resolution or abstained. Calls for the cancellation of the system have come from Britain, France, Canada, Germany, and Denmark ⸺ and, of course, from those “most favored nations” China and Russia.
What threat? A 1995 CIA intelligence estimate on ballistic missiles concluded that the U.S. was safe from missile attacks from small “rogue states.” Furious Republican lawmakers assembled a commission to challenge the CIA findings, made the newly appointed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the commission chair, and got the analysis they wanted. The “Rumsfeld Report” was used by the Bush Administration to protect BMD from its long list of critics.23
The threats used by Congress and the Pentagon’s and missile contractors’ public relations officers to justify the BMD budget have lost all trace of plausibility. The vilification of North Korea for example — with a military budget of $4 billion in 201924 — has lost its bite everywhere but the U.S. This may be because everyone from the President on down in nearly every official statement regarding BMD, targets North Korea. The tiny mouse that is Pyongyang, with a $6 billion military budget and a population less than the state of California, is considered a “rogue state” and “nation of concern” that threatens the U.S. military Goliath. The “be afraid” broken record from the commercial press goes like this:
“The threat of North Korean missile launches is one of the major reasons the U.S. is considering a limited national missile defense system”; “A declassified National Intelligence Estimate has predicted that a North Korean Taepodong II missile will be capable of hitting the U.S. by 2005”; “Development of the current missile defense system accelerated in 1998 after North Korea and Iran flight-tested primitive ballistic missiles”; “to defend against potential threats by such rogue nations as North Korea”; “Mr. Clinton’s self-imposed deadline is dictated by a growing threat from North Korea”; “The system is meant to protect the U.S. against emerging powers such as North Korea.”
Profiteering antimissile industries issue fearsome press releases and they fund sophisticated thinktanks that publish scary white papers, while financing congressional campaigns in exchange for billions in contracts. The World Policy Institute calculated that during the 1997-1998 campaign cycle, the four top missile-defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, TRW and Raytheon ⸺ spent $34 million on lobbying and $6.9 million in campaign contributions. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, issued a report in 2021 detailing the $117 million spent by U.S. weapons contractors on lobbying Congress in 2020 alone.25 The leg work pays off with military contracts that are orders of magnitude greater than the cost of lobbying: as ICAN found in 2024, “Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics remain the biggest nuclear weapons profiteers, with outstanding contracts with a potential value of at least $31 billion and $24 billion respectively.”26
While this fear-mongering propaganda has convinced most that North Korea poses a danger, it has failed to convince a single NATO ally, the Group of Eight, Russia, or China. The General Accounting Office’s June 2000 report also questioned the “uncertain assessments of the potential threats” used to justify the expense of missile defense. In their letter to President Clinton, the 50 Nobel Laureates ridiculed the purported danger, posing the obvious question: “But what would such a state gain by attacking the United States except its own destruction?”
Indeed, North Korea has offered to scrap its long-range missile program if other countries launch two or three of its communications satellites a year from outside the country. This is exactly what the U.S. has previously demanded of Pyongyang. The New York Times editorial board has written that “the proposal merits serious consideration.”27
Conclusion It should be a matter of federal criminal investigation that between $100 and $400 billion has been lavished on weapons contractors for antiballistic missile schemes without producing a working program. Murphy, in The Hill, pointed to the self-defeating aspect of even continuing the program. “The very act of pursuing a missile defense system is already encouraging U.S. adversaries to expand their nuclear arsenals and develop additional technologies to circumvent missile defenses. So, counterintuitively, missile defense is making the world less safe.”
Continued funding of the needless, unworkable, gold-plated, and corrupt missile defense program amounts to larceny and theft. Rather than debating whether or not to give additional billions to the usual suspects, the Department of Justice should be assembling a grand jury.
John LaForge is regular contributor to Znet, Counterpunch, and PeaceVoice, has been a co-director at Nukewatch, a nuclear power and weapons watchdog group in Wisconsin, since 1992, and edits its Quarterly newsletter — available online at www.nukewatchinfo.org.
1Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, “Missile Data to Be Kept Secret,” June 9, 2002, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-09-na-missile9-story.html
2New York Times, May 24, 1999
3New York Times, Oct. 4, 1999
4New York Times, Sept. 2, 2000
5William Broad, New York Times, “US missile defense strategy is flawed, panel finds,” Sept. 12, 2012
6Editorial Board, “An Unnecessary Military Expense,” New York Times, June 4, 2013.
7Arms Control Association, “Current U.S. Missile Defense Programs at a Glance,” January 2025, https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/current-us-missile-defense-programs-glance#exec
8Gabe Murphy, The Hill, “‘A House of Dynamite’ hits its mark, but can missile defense?” Nov. 2, 2025, https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5584351-missile-defense-shield-debate/
9New York Times, May 20, 2000
10William Broad, “Antimissile System’s Flaw Was Covered Up, Critic Says,” New York Times, May 18, 2000
11William Broad, “Pentagon Classified a Letter Critical of Antimissile Plan,” New York Times, May 20, 2000
12William Broad, “Ex-Employee Says Contractor Faked Results of Missile Tests,” New York Times, March 7, 2000
13Ibid, note 11
14William Broad, “Antimissile Testing is Rigged to Hide a Flaw, Critics Say,” New York Times, June 9, 2000
15David Abel, “Critic accuses Pentagon of trying to silence him,” Boston Globe, and Tampa Tribune, June 24, 2000
16William Broad, New York Times, “Antimissile system’s flaw was covered up, critic says,” May 18, 2000; Tom Morganthau with Mary Hager, Newsweek, “Reagan’s Cold War ‘Sting’? A test that fooled the Soviets ⸺ along with the U.S. Congress,” August 30, 1993
17William Broad & David Sanger, “Physicists Say Weapon Failed in Missile Tests,” New York Times, May 18, 2010
18Mark Kukis, “White House mulls accusatory NMD report,” United Press International, May 26, 2000
19William Broad, New York Times, “Nobel winners urge halt to missile plan,” July 6, 2000
20Elaine Sciolino, “Critics Asking Clinton to Stop Advancing Missile Plan,” New York Times, July 7, 2000
21Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, “Missile Data to Be Kept Secret,” June 9, 2002, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-09-na-missile9-story.html
22Paul Richter, “Buch finds missile-defense plan may be a hard sell,” Mpls. Star-Tribune, Feb. 10, 2001; New York Times, “Sweden, Britain: Missile Shield,” Feb. 10, 2001
23New York Times, Sept. 10, 2000
24Kim Tong-Hyung, Associated Press, “North Korea passes new defense budget,” Jan. 19, 2023,
25ICAN, “Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending,” June 2021, https://www.icanw.org/2020_global_nuclear_weapons_spending_complicitm
26ICAN and PAX, “At Great Cost: The companies building nuclear weapons and their financiers”, February 2025, https://assets.nationbuilder.com/ican/pages/6939/attachments/original/1739803384/At_What_Cost_2025Feb_DBOTB.pdf?1739803384
27New York Times, editorial, July 27, 2004
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