Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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North Korea's successful nuclear test on Monday drew international condemnation as

policy makers considered how to respond to the crisis.

As Washington weighs its options, Cato's Vice President for

Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Ted Galen Carpenter offers his recommendation in today's

podcast. Does North Korea's successful nuclear test pose a threat to the United States?

It doesn't pose a direct threat or an immediate threat.

North Korea has conducted a nuclear test.

It has also processed enough plutonium to build as many as seven or eight nuclear weapons.

But we don't know for a fact whether they've actually built any weapons yet, other than the one it just tested.

And beyond that, it still is a good many years away before North Korea could mini-rise

its nuclear weapons to place on top of missiles and pose a threat even to its

neighbors in the region much less develop a long-range missile fleet to pose a

threat to the United States that might emerge someday. It's just not an immediate

threat. But is it wise to wait until North Korea becomes an existential

threat? The United States, if worse comes to worse, can deter North Korea. We've deterred other ugly actors in the

international system in the past including Stalinist Russia in the late 1940s

and 1950s and Mao was China even China during the Cultural

Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s and given the fact we have

thousands of nuclear weapons in our arsenal. We can certainly deter a North Korea that at most even looking a decade from now might have a dozen or two.

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