Here’s something that’s supposed to reassure Americans just waking up to the news that North Korea has a missile on its launch pad that might be able to hit Nome, Alaska: Our side is ready to blast back with “kill vehicles” to intercept and destroy it.

Eleven missile interceptors already are sunk into the ground in Alaska and California.

They’re among dozens envisioned in a $150 billion “missile defense” system intended to cocoon America and her friends from evil, missile-firing rogues like Kim Jong Il. The system also extends to shipboard anti-missile systems, airborne lasers, new types of radar and next-generation space weapons.

This latest iteration of Star Wars is projected to consume 14 percent of the Pentagon’s research and development budget over the next six years.

“I would characterize our capability as robust and significant and very healthy,” Adm. Timothy Keating, chief of U.S. Northern Command, enthused to senators earlier this year.

“When the president declares limited defensive operational capability, we are prepared, as the shooter, if you will, to execute the mission to defend our country. And I’m very confident in the efficacy of the system,” Keating said March 14.

Sometime within the last two weeks, the system went operational under presidential order, the Washington Times reports in an unconfirmed story.

There’s just one little problem.

Keating’s definition of “efficacy” doesn’t seem to equate to something that actually works. He admits that the interceptors haven’t passed a single comprehensive operational test.

Taxpayers may have 11 lemons in the ground – but it still costs $1 million a year to shovel the snow off.

In a novel concept of how to waste billions, the interceptors were built and installed before testing showed they could work.

Now, suggesting that they work when they don’t drives a dangerous game of missile one-upmanship and first-strike roulette that could be pushing Pyongyang’s missile launch preparations. “Crazy” Kim may just want to gauge the capabilities of the U.S. system.

Putting the interceptors in quickly was supposed to speed up testing. Instead, it has slowed things down, even as costs grow.

One of a pair of blistering Government Accountability Office reports this year suggests the interceptors were installed before being adequately checked for faulty parts. The first nine put into silos may have to be removed and upgraded. GAO adds that two recent flight test failures were traced to poor quality control – a broken pin in one case and corrosion in the second.

Another GAO report says the Pentagon has yet to draw up comprehensive operational, command and control-and-security plans for the missiles, including how to handle Colorado and Alaska National Guard soldiers to be called to federal duty to run the missile sites.

Meanwhile, key parts of the system, including sophisticated satellites to track incoming missiles, have yet to be perfected and deployed.

A number of university physicists and astrophysicists say the interceptor system can never work – not because the theory is wrong, but because clever adversaries can always stay two steps ahead of unwieldy, expensive defensive systems by engineering modestly priced decoys and countermeasures.

Either way, this dangerous game of missile chicken can’t end well.

One of the beauties of the old Cold War system of arms-control treaties and deterrence that the Bush team so soundly rejects was its inherent stability. There’s little reason to reach for first-strike capability if the other side can annihilate you. Now, there’s every reason to.

John Pike, director of the military information Web site globalsecurity.org, says one good indicator that the White House doesn’t actually think U.S. missile defenses work is that U.S. jets aren’t dropping bombs on North Korea.

Pushing Pyongyang into a corner where it can do nothing, either to us or our allies, as we lob bombs at them “has been the entire point” of missile defenses, Pike says.

But that leads Pike to this unhappy conclusion: “If it doesn’t work, it’s a waste of money. If it does work, it’ll cause us to go blow up somebody.”

Maybe 11 multibillion-dollar lemons are a good thing, after all.