Yesterday, US grounded all planes on the west coast for ten minutes

Give the timing, uncertainty, countermeasures, and consequences of not intercepting... "Your flight leaves 30 minutes later" is a small price to pay vs "Passenger airliner shot down."

Airliners carry less than 1,000 people. Usually a lot less.

Nukemap says 10kt on downtown LA would result in about 71,000 immediate casualties.

Would you want to be in the air when someone at NORAD has to make a call on something that may or may not be a passenger airliner?

I can't see any way planes in Western US airspace could possibly interfere with tracking an NK launched ICBM, even by clutter, except maybe in the last minutes of the terminal phase of warhead descent at which point any defense (active or civil or both) would already have to have been committed to do any good.

Grounding planes is to mitigate risk to the people on the planes, and maybe to clear lines of fire for anti-missile systems (which is mostly about protecting people who aren't on the planes, but incidentally also protects those on the planes, too.)

But NORAD said they didn't ask for it:

The official says it was not a national ground stop and may have been issued by a regional air traffic control facility.

“No warning was issued by NORAD HQ,” regarding a potential threat to the US, according to Captain Pamela Kunze, the chief NORAD spokesperson.

There's a lot of noise about admittedly really impressive low-altitude air-breathing scramjets, but - as your articles point out - those are still a long way away. The war hawks like to complain that we're not spending sufficiently many billions on developing futuristic hypersonic scramjet missiles. They point to our lack of a working scramjet as evidence that we're doing poorly. And look! North Korea's launched a hypersonic missile, China's launched hypersonic test missiles, Russia's launching hypersonic missiles; we're behind in the next war and it hasn't even started yet!

But those are just orbital or sub-orbital rockets at 50-100km altitude. Of course they're hypersonic, but that's not really that difficult - just build a big rocket, go up for a while, then turn sideways. We've been doing it since the 50s, tech is good enough now that relatively small companies like Firefly Space are launching small satellites to LEO with Series A fundraising of just $75 million. Tada! Hypersonic! The main point is that everyone has the capability to launch lots of these simple rockets, which can be devastatingly effective. Not as effective as highly steerable reentry vehicles or hypersonic scramjets, but enough that no one wants to be a target.

I can't count the number of times I've been on a flight where the captain said something like, "Well, we left a little late, but we'll make it up on the way there, and expect to arrive on time."

I've had international flights leave an hour late and still arrive on time.

Anyone who knows US aviation knows that its foundation is "safety over time," precisely because it's such a multivariate problem and trying to be overly fixed to a schedule gets people killed.

From article, '... captures the controller telling the pilot of a Cessna to land ...'.

The Karens waving their arms about safety seem addicted to their fear-based adrenaline rush.

https://futurism.com/military-f35-nuclear-missiles

If you wanted to do a non-air and non-boat link your only cost-effective option would be to do surface rail to Alaska and then cross about ~80 kilometers by bridge or tunnel (which is about the same as the Channel Tunnel)

Sure as hell a direct tunnel from San Francisco to Tokyo wouldn't be doable. (The US cannot even finish their California high speed rail project)

There’s a regional airline near me that services TX, OK, TN, and GA. The first few times I flew on it I checked my handgun. After doing that a couple of times and getting weird looks, I was on a flight where the pilot saw the small, hard-sided case in the cargo area and asked whose it was. I replied that it was mine, and he handed it to me - he said it was small enough that if we hit turbulence it could end up in the cabin and hit someone.

2) If we don’t screen bags and a gun or bomb gets on board, it doesn’t matter wether the door is locked or not, that plane is at the mercy of the terrorist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout. While you're correct, the planes don't want to be in that crossfire, the missile targeting system would more than easily account for civilian aircraft and avoid them.

Getting rid of some of that clutter sounds really nice for performance.

Those don't have nuclear warheads; that went out with Nike-Zeus in the 1960s.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI7o5exA0tI

There's almost no certainty that we can stop an ICBM. We have untested systems and untested warning systems that the Soviet Union never even bothered to test. But now there's a rogue nation trying to play tough guy sitting across the Pacific Ocean with nuclear weapons and an experimental ICBM platform.

If an ICBM gets launched, the USA is probably going to throw everything we got to try to stop the missile. Then we'll probably fail, and the city will get nuked anyway. But we gotta do everything within our power to make the probability of success as high as possible.

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San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. etc. Any of those cities could be lost within a few minutes under these scenarios. If people are saying that this airplane stop-order was over a nuke, I think its actually 100% reasonable to have done these stop-flying orders.

I view it like a flat tire. If you have a slow leak, you’re mostly in control and can get it refilled and monitor it. If you know the tire is losing air at medium speed, you can navigate to a safer space and potentially to a place to fix the issue. The worst case is a blowout while driving 70+ MPH on a highway with no shoulder while you’re only halfway paying attention to the road. All situations are about how your control is limited and maximizing your actions to get a safe & disruption free remedy. If you’re driving high speed and your low pressure light comes on, you’d be wise to at least pull over and inspect the issue. Not a perfect analogy but you get the gist.

Why try to seriously threaten the US mainland, when it’s significantly easier to hold millions of US-allied civilians hostage?

I have no idea what Russia will do in this scenario. Anything seems possible.

That said, I could easily see them shooting ballistic missiles into the ocean 100 miles off the west coast at random times to cause disruption and chaos in the state that provides the biggest chunk of the US GDP (California).

The FAA and US would have no choice but to react as if it "might" be heading for landfall and unable to "launch on warn" because of the geopolitical consequences of obliterating a chunk of KP when their "harmless test" did no damage at all, would be high.

So in the "perception is everything" game, KP's moves appear to me to been about making themselves look good and the US look bad.

So my non-foreign policy analyst position is that this where I see this going over the next 5 - 10 yrs.

> The NORAD spokeswoman said the normal sequence following the launch was followed: The missile launch was detected, and it was assessed not to be a threat to the continental United States. The standard practice is for FAA to have a constant liaison in the NORAD ops center, therefore would have been aware of the quick assessment.

I presume the "quick assessment" is not an instant assessment, and the FAA rep present may have passed on the "there's a missile and they're assessing right now" to HQ while it was going on.