Arms races are a fundamental part of shaping the world order and its balance of power. The subject has long been a principal part of the international agenda, whether at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s or after the “détente” that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. That close call inspired the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I and SALT II), which culminated in agreements to limit the deployment and cap the numbers of nuclear missiles.
By the late 1970s, the spirit of détente had waned as President Ronald Reagan entered the White House and a “new” or “second” Cold War began. That would end about a decade later with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Diplomacy was given the lead again, resulting in other agreements, known is START I and II, this time aiming to reduce the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons.
The arms race intensifies when tensions escalate between the great powers, Western and Eastern camps, and the rest of the world in between. With the turn of the 21st century, technological advances in the defence industry expanded the horizons of the arms race, intensifying competition over increasingly sophisticated defensive and offensive systems. Moreover, by this time, the number of competitors increased. Israel entered the nuclear club, followed by India and Pakistan. Other countries tried and failed, such as Syria, Libya, and Iraq. The most dangerous developments have occurred in Iran, adding a nuclear dimension to the Middle Eastern tinderbox, into which Iran injected the element of pro-Iran militias and new types of missiles and drones.
What initially seemed like a localised and regional arms race in the Middle East adds another dimension to the series of battles involving Israel against both the Lebanese Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas, as well as in the air against Iran on the Syrian front and the Houthis in Yemen. The ongoing, fifth Gaza war has revealed significant weapons capacities among non-state actors capable of prolonged resistance. This has threatened stability across a wide strategic arena including the Arabian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa, Red Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea.
These battles are engaging new types of long-range ballistic missiles that exit Earth’s atmosphere and then re-enter it. Multiple air defence systems have been deployed to intercept them, the most notable being Israel’s “Iron Dome,” which has proven effective. There are also missile-to-missile defence systems deployed aboard US aircraft carriers in the Red Sea and Mediterranean. In fact, the prolonged US engagement with the Houthis in Yemen has led the US to developing a new missile defence system known as the “Golden Dome.”
Such developments have fired the imagination of US defence planners. Not only have they begun a missile defence “dome” that would cover the entire US territory, but they have also shifted their gaze skywards to contemplate extraterrestrial systems based in outer space, equipped with drones to knock out ballistic missiles before they re-enter the earth’s atmosphere.
Theoretically, the idea is feasible. Our planet’s orbital regions are already packed with assorted communications, weather, and defence satellites. In fact, the concept dates back to the Reagan administration of the 1980s, when the arms race known as “Star Wars” inspired the eponymous film and its sequels, and those remain popular today. At the same time, the US began to develop a branch of the military dedicated to interplanetary and interstellar defence and warfare.
The construction of the “Golden Dome” will cost an estimated $175 billion! In conjunction with this astronomical price tag, the debate between defensive and offensive warfare that has raged since the dawn of human history is shifting to outer space. At the same time, the “Golden Dome” has triggered the customary cycle of innovations in defence capacities prompting others to invent ever more sophisticated offensive weapons to outwit the new defences and so on. Russia and China have protested Washington’s new military technology venture, precisely because of the risks of a new arms race. This one will be both unprecedented and unforeseeable in scope as contestants race to linking earth to space with new and perhaps previously unimagined missile and drone capacities designed to achieve assorted defensive and offensive military, strategic, security and geopolitical goals – perhaps even all at once.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 June, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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