Well, BMDO has come out with a glossy new brochure explaining where tall the money goes, more or less.  You can view it here.  They even have charts and pictures explaining how a missile defense intercept would work.  Everything sounds very sensible until they get to step four: (4)  A Ground-Based Interceptor is Launched Notice the passive tense.  Launched by whom?  HAL 9000?  VP Cheney, on 24 hour alert?  Some sleep-deprived non-com at Cheyenne Mountain?  The window in which a decision must be made to launch or not launch an interceptor missile will be quite short -a few minutes at best.  Which means the decision will have to be made by a military officer at NORAD or some similar facility.  But they won't just wing it.  They'll think through the options ahead of time, right?   We sent our crack reporting staff to NORAD HQ, and after a bit of dumpster-diving, they found the following:
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