North Korea's test launch last weekend of a Taepodong-2 missile was a failure, right? Unless you believe the Pyongyang government's propaganda (we're skeptical), the missile failed to place an experimental satellite into orbit. The rocket's third stage did not do its job, essentially.

Well, yes ... and no. Bruce Bechtol, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and professor at the U.S. Marine Command and Staff College, argued at a forum at the conservative American Enterprise Institute this week that the launch did bring benefits to North Korea.

"It was not as successful as it could have been," Bechtol said, but North Korea learned from the failure. It shows the North Koreans "have advanced their capabilities for an ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile)."

The launch was certainly more successful than the last test in 2006, when the rocket exploded 40 seconds after lift-off.

The nightmare scenario, for Japan, the United States and others, is that North Korea could someday develop a reliable missile with intercontinental range that could carry a miniaturized nuclear weapon. For now, Pyongyang has neither a reliable missile or, as far as we know, a miniaturized nuclear weapon.

Bechtol pointed out that it also does not have the advantage of surprise. During the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles were ready to be fueled and launched within minutes. With North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile, U.S. spy satellites watched for weeks as the missile was taken out of a building, transported to the launched pad, erected and fueled.

"A missile that takes two months to get ready is not a threat to us or anybody else," Bechtol said.

Bechtol, a retired Marine who has lived and worked in South Korea, is a bit of a hard-liner where the North is concerned. He's author of Red Rogue: The Persistent Challenge of North Korea. At the AEI session, he dismissed the prevalent political analysis about why North Korea undertook the launch now--to test Obama, to strengthen ailing leader Kim Jong-Il's internal position, etc.--in favor of a much more simple explanation. The main reason North Korea tested the missile? "It was ready." North Korea gets valuable hard currency from missile sales, with Iran being its No.1 customer.

Judging the development of ballistic missile programs, particularly in controlled societies like North Korea, is a tricky business. A commission headed by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted that countries such as North Korea would be able to "inflict major destruction" on the United States within five years of a decision to pursue ballistic missile capability. It said North Korea's Taepodong-2 could be flight tested within six months of a decision to do so, and, if the test was a success, the missile operationally deployed rapidly after that.

The Rumsfeld Commission issued its report in 1998.