The U.S. Space Force has disclosed the first plans to put anti-missile interceptors in space as a key piece of the ambitious Golden Dome missile shield, which Mr. Trump wants operational by 2028.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz is tracking this story and reports on the Space Force announcement late last week that it will spend $3.2 billion — divided between 12 defense contractors — to rapidly build the first U.S. system of high-technology, space-based anti-missile interceptors. 

Space interceptors and tracking systems will be used to close a gap in defenses when combined with current ground- and sea-based missile defense systems. If necessary, space-based interceptors could also strike orbiting nuclear systems being developed by China and Russia.

Mr. Allen doesn’t directly name the president in his anti-Trump screed. But the document outlined his anger over multiple administration actions, including U.S. strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats, efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and the handling of files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done,” Mr. Allen wrote in the more than 1,000-word manifesto.

White House reporter Jeff Mordock is tracking this angle of the fast-moving story as authorities try to learn more about what drove Mr. Allen to allegedly charge a security checkpoint and open fire at Saturday night’s Washington gala.

Mr. Allen said the attack was his “first real opportunity” to do something about the “crimes” of the Trump administration and that officials must be taken out from “highest-ranking to lowest.”

Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak has an in-depth dispatch examining the legacy of the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster and how the Russia-Ukraine war has exposed deep-seated nuclear dangers.

Forty years after the explosion of Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the site remains one of the world’s most complex nuclear cleanup operations. A Russian drone strike in February 2025 hit the upper section of the site’s “New Safe Confinement,” a $2.3 billion project designed to seal the reactor’s radioactive remains for a century. Radiation levels remained stable, but international nuclear officials said the facility lost key elements of its confinement function.

And the war has also impacted Chernobyl in other ways. Its safety systems rely on stable electricity supplies, continuous monitoring and controlled access. Wartime conditions complicate all three.

Repairs are slow and difficult, constrained by radiation levels that limit how long workers can remain in certain areas. Meanwhile, costs are mounting, with estimates for restoring the damaged arch running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Mr. Ptak reports a clear conclusion: Nuclear safety systems built in peacetime are not designed for modern conflict.

It would have sounded like science fiction even just a few years ago. But the concept of data centers in space — and perhaps even on the moon — is being touted as a realistic answer to the growing constraints facing new data centers and server farms on Earth.

On the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast, Rob DeMillo, co-founder and CEO of the company Sophia Space, explains why the idea will be technologically possible in the short term and also will offer a path forward for companies facing an increasingly hostile grassroots backlash to the construction of new data centers across the country.

“They are a drain on the local economy. They are a drain on the energy consumption of that region. They’re a drain on the water consumption of that region. That has an effect on everybody’s water and electric bills,” he said. “They generate a tremendous amount of heat that gets dumped into the local environment. There are land rights issues. … In space, you don’t have any of that.”

Last week’s ouster of Navy Secretary John C. Phelan could offer the service a key opportunity to make long-overdue changes to its procurement and acquisition systems, which are designed to allow Pentagon bureaucrats to reject proposals from highly qualified firms so they can award contracts to their preferred suppliers.

That’s the argument from Christopher M. Lehman Sr., a national security analyst with decades of experience in senior defense and national security roles. In a new op-ed for The Washington Times, he argues that significant changes are needed to allow startups and other small businesses into an arena traditionally dominated by a handful of shipbuilding mega-companies.

Sweeping reform, he says, will also help shipbuilding companies spend more time on their actual work rather than mountains of paperwork and Pentagon red tape.

“Let the shipbuilders stick to shipbuilding, and let the small and innovative companies out onto the playing field,” Mr. Lehman writes. 

• April 28 — Belgium’s Defense Minister on the Future of Transatlantic Security Relations, Atlantic Council

• April 29 — Cuba: Prospects for Transition, Hudson Institute

• April 30 — Hearing: Taking a Bigger Byte | China’s Expanding Strategy for Data Dominance, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission

• April 30 — Korean Messiah: The Religious and Ideological Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, American Enterprise Institute

• April 30 — A Conversation with Libya’s U.N Ambassador Taher El-Sonni: Libya’s Strategic Outlook, Stimson Center

• May 4 — What’s Next for Japanese Security Policy and U.S.-Japan Relations? Perspectives from the Diet, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 4 — Economic Security and Mega Choke Points: Japan’s Strategic Reset, Brookings Institution 

• May 7-9 — The Artificial Intelligence+ Expo, Special Competitive Studies Project