OpinionJournal - Missile Defense Test

Now The Wall Street Journalis talking sense. Their suggestion: if the North Koreans fire a test ICBM, we simply blow it out of the sky with our prototype antimissile systems. A single Aegis cruiser should be able to take care of it--or any of nine missile interceptors now deployed in operational, not test, mode along the West Coast.

In point of fact, we don't know that it's a test until the missile comes down--and that's the wrong time to find that it has a live warhead, especially if it's a nuke! And in any event, blowing their test missile out of the sky would send the most dramatic message you can imagine to everyone in the region that certain things are non-starters.