Iron Beam Goes Live: Golden Dome 2.0 & the Obsolescence of Nuclear Weapons
Israel's operational deployment last week of its Iron Beam air & missile defense is the proving ground for the 2.0 version of Trump's Golden Dome. It may render nuclear weapons functionally obsolete.
by Rod D. Martin
September 29, 2025
Last week, Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems announced that their Iron Beam laser air defense system, jointly developed with the United States, is officially operational. The system has been declared combat-ready, with the first units to be delivered to the Israeli Defense Forces before the end of 2025.
This is more than a technical milestone. Iron Beam is designed not just to dazzle or disable but to burn through enemy rockets, mortars, drones, and aircraft at the speed of light. And unlike the missile systems in current use — which range from $70,000 to millions of dollars per shot — Iron Beam has an effectively unlimited magazine, with each shot costing about $2.
You read that right. It will now be orders of magnitude cheaper to defend than to attack. That is world-changing.
Israel’s decision to field Iron Beam is a direct response to years of attritional warfare waged by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran using low-cost, high-volume rocket and drone attacks. The Iron Dome interceptor system has performed incredibly well in this long fight, intercepting thousands of incoming projectiles and saving countless lives. But it has also highlighted a dangerous asymmetry: each Tamir interceptor costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — Patriots cost far more than that — while each incoming rocket often costs only a few hundred.
Iron Beam changes that equation. By plugging directly into Israel’s already layered defense — Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow — the new laser system adds a virtually inexhaustible, nearly cost-free tier of protection. Israel has crossed a threshold into a new era of defense.
But it didn’t cross that threshold alone.
One of the most persistent Democrat critiques of missile defense has always been — literally since it was invented in the 1960s — that cheaper nuclear missiles and warheads could overwhelm any possible defense simply because of the cost of production.
But now, Donald Trump’s Golden Dome — interceptor-based like Israel’s Iron Dome — has the chance to transcend that. The 2.0 version — on the ground, in the air, and in orbit — will surely be laser-augmented, leveraging the Iron Beam technology to radically increase firepower while largely eliminating the cost. In the process, nuclear missiles of all types, and therefore nuclear war itself, may become obsolete.
Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller’s vision — “better a shield than a sword” — is finally becoming not just a reality but an inevitability.
Details: The Economics Have Completely Changed
To understand the revolutionary impact of Iron Beam, we must start with the math.