aggressive containment
I'm willing to accept a shaky legal justification, sort of the "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" principle. The idea is essentially very direct sabotage of a dangerous program, and while lawyers might grumble over the technicalities, I don't think we'd really take a lot of heat for it.
BTW, interesting DOD report on the various laser weapon programs under development (at the time: 1999). A relevant phrase caught my eye:
The ABL program has made progress in addressing some technical challenges, such as completing the collection of non-optical atmospheric turbulence data from the Korean and Middle East theaters.
Sounds very much like the ABL was designed for this very purpose, doesn't it? With a range described as "several hundred kilometers", the ABL wouldn't be much good targeting launches inside traditional adversaries like the Soviet Union, but it's ideal for swatting down missiles from little tinhorn dictatorships like North Korea...and Iran.
The tactic I'm suggesting is not in the same league as going to war, and I think of it as more in line with 60 years of experience at containment, than with Bush's recent innovation of preemptive war. That doctrine has proved pretty hollow because it's extreme--out of the three charter members of the "Axis of Evil", it could only be applied to Iraq. I'm in the middle of reading Cobra 2, the military history of the Iraq war, and one point the authors point out the irony that of the three, Iraq was the only feasible target precisely because it was the least threatening. The other two were known to have nukes and strong armies, but Iraq, well, Iraq was just Iraq, as it turned out.
You've asked from time to time what a Democrat might do, and I think that this sort of thing is one example. It's consistent with past tactics, like Clinton's 1998 cruise missile attack on Iraq, and also the no-fly zone concept with the promise of shooting down Iraqi planes that violate it. We could establish a no-flying-out-of-the-atmosphere zone above North Korea and, assuming that the ABL is finally ready, very probably enforce such a zone.
We really do have a vast amount of institutional expertise at the Pentagon and in Washington about how to do containment, and I really think that Bush made a serious mistake tossing it all and reverting back to a 19th Century "great power" posture. We know from experience that aggressive containment works, let's not abandon a useful tool.