December 17, 2025
The Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) together with the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH), organized a two-day international workshop in Berlin on December 11-12, 2025, on missile defense. This was the second SGS-IFSH workshop on this topic. Both workshops were organized by Igor Morić of SGS and Timur Kadyshev of IFSH.
The workshop convened a group of international scientists, technology experts, science and technology scholars, and policy specialists to critically assess the technical, institutional, policy and political and strategic risks associated with the development of the proposed multilayered Golden Dome missile defense system announced by President Trump on January 27, 2025. This plan envisages an integrated constellation of ground, sea-based and space-based platforms able to detect, track, intercept and destroy ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, and aerial weapons including drones, as well as offer a capability to destroy such systems before they launched.
The workshop explored the history of U.S. strategic missile defense efforts from President Reagan's failed 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to the current Golden Dome proposal for a multi-layered defense system intended to defend against “any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland.” The meeting reviewed the threats that Golden Dome is intended to counter, the feasibility of the extensive space-based sensor architecture required to support such a multilayered missile defense, and the projected cost of different potential Golden Dome architectures and the practicality of funding them through deployment and completion.
The meeting considered the implications for US adversaries and allies of the attempt develop and deploy Golden Dome, including arms racing and asymmetric countermeasures. It also unpacked the political, bureaucratic, and commercial drivers shaping U.S. missile defense efforts, and how to understand and overcome the persistent challenges experts face explaining the limits of ballistic missile defense to policymakers and the public, and what arguments historically have worked and not worked to reform missile defense policies and what this may mean for informing and influencing missile defense decision-making today.
The workshop builds on work at SGS by Igor Moric on the Golden Dome, including the June 2025 article Dome of Delusion: The Many Costs of Ballistic Missile Defense. It also builds on work by Timur Kadyshev supported by SGS to develop and apply a new open-source software tool to advance the independent technical assessment of ballistic missiles and missile defense systems.