A way out of the no-good-options-regarding-North-Korea bind?

Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery  Institute's Center for Science and Culture, writing at NRO, says we need not live with our current array off options concerning the North Korean threat:

Many analysts have assumed that the U.S. has only three basic options for addressing the North Korean threat: an offensive first strike, diplomatic initiatives involving China and sanctions, or acquiescence. But the United States has other options that do not require either starting a war, waiting for help from the unwilling, or accepting the vulnerability of U.S. and allied cities to a North Korean missile attack. Rather than initiating a military strike or continuing to pursue ineffective diplomatic initiatives, the United States can take advantage of recent technological advances to deploy a more effective multi-layered missile defense, including one system perfectly suited to defuse the North Korean crisis.

Enter HALE BPI:

  . . . the United States urgently needs to develop and deploy higher altitude and space-based systems for missile defense. Arthur Herman of the Hudson Institute has taken the lead on advocating one such high-altitude system with particular promise for neutralizing the North Korean threat. Known as High Altitude Long Endurance Boost Phase Intercept (or HALE BPI), this system would offer another option besides acquiescence or a high-risk first strike against North Korean missile launchers.

As conceived by Len Caveny, the former director of science and technology at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the HALE BPI system would host anti-missile missiles on existing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have the capacity for continuous flying for 18 to 40 hours or more (thus, the term “long endurance” in the HALE acronym). Using sophisticated radar, infrared detection, and “data fusion” technology, these missile-equipped UAVs would circle the Sea of Japan outside North Korean airspace at an altitude of 45,000 feet or more. Upon detection and verification of a missile launch from North Korea, the HALE BPI UAV’s operator on the ground would have time (perhaps a minute or more) to fire a purely kinetic missile, i.e. a missile without an explosive warhead, at the missile in its “boost phase.” Using already existing guidance systems and the pure kinetic energy that can be generated by even a small object moving at an extremely rapid velocity, the missile would destroy a North Korea missile almost as soon as it leaves the launch pad.

Caveny says that such a system could be operational within 12 months if put on "an expedited war footing."

Advantages: It would minimize debris that would fall to earth from the destroyed missiles,  it wouldn't pose a threat to the deterrent capabilities of large-land-mass adversaries like Russia and China, which are currently concerned about that, and the way it's designed would

give ground operators a minute or more to decide whether a rising object over North Korea has a trajectory that indicates a ballistic missile on a dangerous course. In this context, a full minute represents an eternity and could prevent an unnecessarily provocative response from the United States and its allies to a “false positive,” and time to decide that the missile’s trajectory indeed represents a threat and must be destroyed.

Only concern, and I saw this expressed in the comments below the article, is that it has to be airtight. No such-and-such-intercept-success-rate calculations.

LITD will keep an eye out for further commentary on this.