Paul Carroll discusses implications of North Korea launch

In Voice of America's continuing analysis of North Korea’s April 5 launch, experts discuss what threat North Korea’s nuclear program poses to the U.S. While technically the launch was a failure, it did accomplish something, according to Paul Carroll, Ploughshares Fund program director: "From a political point of view, it was a success in terms of getting the world's attention, getting the U.S.'s attention. It certainly was a provocative and a sort of 'hey look at me' kind of exercise." Analysts believe North Korea has a long way to go before it perfects the Taepodong-2 rocket to carry either a satellite or a nuclear warhead.

As Jim Walsh of the Ploughshares-funded Security Studies Program at MIT explained, it is “comparatively relatively simple to build a nuclear weapon because most first stage, early stage nuclear weapons are quite large and it's a pretty straightforward engineering task. But miniaturizing that nuclear weapon and then putting it on a missile and launching that missile and having 100 percent certainty that missile is supposed to go where you're aiming it and is not going to blow up over your own country - that's quite a technological feat."

Read the previous secions, part one, part two and part three, of the analysis.