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President Donald Trump hasn’t talked much lately about Golden Dome , his much-ballyhooed defense initiative that he claimed could shoot down enemy missiles as they darted toward U.S. territory, thus transforming—in some ways, ending—the nuclear era.

Maybe that’s because a consensus has emerged that the program is doomed to failure except as a giant sinkhole for money to defense contractors.

Just this past May, Trump claimed that the program—which he likened to Israel’s Iron Dome system—would cost just $175 billion and be up and ready by the end of his term.

Yet a new study published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that the progr

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