Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Newsmax on Thursday that he thinks President Donald Trump’s just-announced Golden Dome missile defense system likely won’t take three years to build, as the president has projected, saying he thinks the project will get the Chinese to engage with the United States on nuclear issues.

During an appearance on “The Chris Salcedo Show,” Shaffer contrasted the impending reality of Trump’s defense system with the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a theoretical project intended to safeguard the U.S. from Soviet ballistic missile attacks and nuclear annihilation.

“So, SDI was a bluff,” Shaffer said. “I’ve talked to Bud McFarlane, [national security adviser to former President Ronald Reagan] who was there at Reykjavik, and when [former Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev bet the farm on stopping us from getting SDI, not knowing it was a complete bluff, they fell for it and we won the [Cold] War. Well, there’s no bluff now. The elements which we started working on back then have now been fielded.

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