Say the usa and soviet union in cold war. History has records of incidents were dalse alarms (including one from the sun) almost started nuclear armageddon.
How did they keep testing missiles (ICBM) with longer and longer ranges without it being detected as a real missle?
Not to mention there are still states that are neighbored by hostile countries and still manage to do their ICBM tests with ranges encompassing multiple continents. How do they manage it?
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Other people have covered the diplomatic and technical controls that allow tests to happen without anyone panicking, but something else worth considering is that a test involves one missile at a time. This in and of itself is enough to distinguish it from an attack.
A single missile is not, to the best of my knowledge, capable of destroying an entire nation’s ability to retaliate. As a result, if you see a single missile launch, you can afford to wait and see if it’s a test or not. If it turns out to be an attack, you don’t really lose anything by waiting (launching earlier isn’t likely to reduce your losses to the single missile that’s already in the air) until it lands and you know for sure. Whereas if it wasn’t an attack, you just started WWIII for no reason.
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