Trump unveiled initial plans for the "state of the art" missile defense system dubbed "Golden Dome" earlier this month, which he said would be up and running by the end of his administration to shield against "next-generation" threats like ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. An increasingly belligerent North Korea has forged ahead with its weapons development, including nuclear warheads. The "Golden Dome" has drawn sharp criticism from Russia and China, North Korea's two most important allies.

North Korea's foreign ministry has criticised the U.S. Golden Dome missile defense shield project as a "very dangerous threatening initiative", state media said on Tuesday. U.S. President Donald Trump on May 20 said he had picked a design for the Golden Dome missile defense system and named a leader of the ambitious $175 billion program.

On May 20, President Donald Trump launched the Golden Dome missile defense initiative. I was in college when President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative—initially mocked by its opponents as "Star Wars." Trump named Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein as the Golden Dome project’s leader, a tell that the system will be primarily space-based. Technology in two areas has altered the equation for missile defense, likely making defending against nuclear missiles—even hypersonic ones, less expensive than building the offensive nuclear weapons. This was not the case when Reagan announced SDI in 1983. The Great Communicator said then that, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? … this is a formidable, technical task … will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts... But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is."