How do ICBM early warning systems differentiate between a real threat and a launch of a normal rocket intended to go to space?
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ICBMs have the property of being hard to move and easy to see. In fact, US ICBM silos in active use are documented on Wikipedia. It’s no stretch to imagine that other countries know that too, and vice versa.
Furthermore, civilian spaceports also tend not to move. This greatly simplifies the problem of differentiating a missile with a warhead from a rocket with a satellite.
Further, rocket launches come with a whole dog and pony show to ensure there’s no aircraft in the safety corridor surrounding the rocket’s flight path, including depending on the launch trajectory requesting permission from other countries to send the rocket through their airspace. Even secret military rocket launches are handled like this, they’re just not as well televised nor is there much (if any) information about the payload.
ICBMs have none of this preparation. They are designed to get launched within about a minute of verifying that they’re actually supposed to. They just appear out of a field in North Dakota in this hypothetical circumstance.
One exception to this is the launch silo at Vandenberg. Occasionally they’ll shoot off a real missile with dummy warheads, for testing. This involves similar preparations to a civilian rocket launch as well as the same sort of approval process.
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