I thought this tech was out there in the 1980s—a variation of the Star Wars technology.
One of the explicit goals was to shoot down enemy missiles while they in “outer space”.
The time to shoot down a missile is when it is going “ballistic”, meaning when the rocket engines shut off and it starts to come back to earth. They are going too fast after they have started their path downward.
SDI was planning to fire stuff at the missiles on the way up.
Star Wars wasn’t putting nukes in space. The closest thing to the original Star Wars plan is the Iron Dome system.