RE: Why would anyone float this idea? If you want to “test” our missile defense system, try it against the NORKs test. If it fails, don’t say a word, it works, let everyone know.
We have LEAKERS everywhere. This line from the article already tells us:
“The US military is considering shooting down North Korean missile tests as a show of strength to Pyongyang, two sources briefed on the planning told the Guardian.”
...These operations consisted mainly of air and naval probes near Soviet borders. The activity was virtually invisible except to a small circle of White House and Pentagon officials--and, of course, to the Kremlin. "'It was very sensitive,' recalls former undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle. 'Nothing was written down about it, so there would be no paper trail.'"Emphasis added.
The purpose of this program was not so much to signal US intentions to the Soviets as to keep them guessing what might come next. The program also probed for gaps and vulnerabilities in the USSR's early warning intelligence system:
"Sometimes we would send bombers over the North Pole and their radars would click on," recalls Gen. Jack Chain, [a] former Strategic Air Command commander. "Other times fighter-bombers would probe their Asian or European periphery." During peak times, the operation would include several maneuvers in a week. They would come at irregular intervals to make the effect all the more unsettling. Then, as quickly as the unannounced flights began, they would stop, only to begin again a few weeks later.
According to published accounts, the US Navy played a key role in the PSYOP program after President Reagan authorized it in March 1981 to operate and exercise near maritime approaches to the USSR, in places where US warships had never gone before...In the August-September 1981 exercise, an armada of 83 US, British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships led by the carrier Eisenhower managed to transit the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap undetected, using a variety of carefully crafted and previously rehearsed concealment and deception measures. A combination of passive measures (maintaining radio silence and operating under emissions control conditions) and active measures (radar-jamming and transmission of false radar signals) turned the allied force into something resembling a stealth fleet, which even managed to elude a Soviet low-orbit, active-radar satellite launched to locate it. As the warships came within operating areas of Soviet long-range reconnaissance planes, the Soviets were initially able to identify but not track them. Meanwhile, Navy fighters conducted an unprecedented simulated attack on the Soviet planes as they refueled in-flight, flying at low levels to avoid detection by Soviet shore-based radar sites.