http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/11/09/california.contrails/index.html?hpt=C2 I'm guessing either plane or nuke. Me watching Call of Duty for the last few days has nothing to do with it. But it does make me feel reassured that the Pentagon has no idea what it is, if a nuclear disaster ever does happen, I know I can count on them to interpret it within the first five minutes to launch a counter to stop it.
As the guy in the article said, it looks pretty much like an airplane contrail. If it were going at rocket-speed, the contrail would not be so dispersed. There's no real reason otherwise to believe that it's a missile. :/
I know, I've been watching CoD too much. Just the whole thing in my opinion took to long to figure it out. If it was a threat, we would've been dead by now. I'm not saying it is a nuke, I was joking about that. But yeah, they dropped the ball on this one, in my opinion.
Well a lot of it taking a while is that they saw no threat. If their sensors picked up an unpermitted rocket then they likely would have been on top of it in a heartbeat. Since they saw nothing wrong they then had to look at what other people thought was wrong and try to figure out what actually happened from that. A longer process that is a lower priority seeing as it isn't their job to try and calm people down every time someone believes that something is wrong; it's more of a fringe job since if they said nothing then people would really be questioning their safety.
If it were a nuke, it doesn't matter what you guys actually do; you're still going to get nuked. The point is that you have ample time to launch back, so you can also nuke them. Mutually assured destruction doesn't help you if nukes are launched, but it stops nukes getting launched.
I find it hard to believe that "nobody" knows. I'm sure someone knows what it is, they just haven't reported it. People expect "the government" to know and share the information, but the "government" is a vague concept. I wouldn't be surprised if some agency/armed forces base/research center knows and they just didn't publish it.
