The initiative announced by Donald Trump on "Iron Dome for America" is more than just a plan to build another anti-ballistic system. It harkens back to the "Star Wars" concept, with which President Ronald Reagan challenged the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

I N THE LATE 1980s Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, and Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist, proposed a seemingly bizarre scheme to defend America against missile attack. The “Brilliant Pebbles” system envisaged thousands of small satellites in low-Earth orbit,

The United States is estimated to have spent more than $400 billion on the kinds of antimissile goals that the president now says will provide “for the common defense.”