The satellite North Korea mounted on the rocket weighs only 100 kilograms (220 pounds), according to the office of South Korean lawmaker Jung Chung-rae, who was briefed by a senior South Korean intelligence official. A nuclear warhead would be about five times heavier.

Other missing parts of the puzzle include an accurate long-range missile guidance system and a re-entry vehicle able to survive coming back into the atmosphere at the high speeds — 10,000 mph — traveled by intercontinental ballistic missiles. Both are seen as being years off.

‘‘Those are pretty serious tasks,’’ Wright said.

History also shows that first-generation, long-range missiles need dozens of test flights before they are accurate enough to be deployed.

The world’s ‘‘ICBM club’’ has just four countries: the United States, Russia, China and France, according to Markus Schiller, an analyst with Schmucker Technologie in Germany and a leading expert on North Korean missiles.

If North Korea ‘‘really intended to become a player in the ICBM game, they would have to develop a different kind of missile, with higher performance,’’ Schiller said. ‘‘And if they do that seriously, we would have to see flight tests every other month, over several years.’’

Wright said the Unha-3 rocket launched Wednesday has a potential range of 8,000 to 10,000 kilometers (4,970 to 6,210 miles), which could put Hawaii and the northwest coast of the mainland United States within range.

But even if North Korea builds a ballistic missile based on a liquid-fueled rocket like the 32-meter (105-foot)-tall Unha-3, it would take days to assemble and hours to fuel. That would make it vulnerable to attack in a pre-emptive airstrike. Solid-fueled missiles developed by the U.S. and Soviet Union are more mobile, more easily concealed and ready to launch within minutes.

But Victor Cha, a former White House director for Asia policy, warned there has been an unspoken tendency in the United States to regard North Korea as a technologically backward and bizarre country, underestimating the strategic threat it poses.

‘‘This is no longer acceptable,’’ he wrote in a commentary.

Money, however, is another problem for Pyongyang. A weak economy, chronic food shortages and the sanctions make it difficult to sustain a program that can build and operate reliable missiles.

‘‘I don’t think the young leader (Kim Jong Un) has any confidence that the home economy could afford a credible deterrent capability,’’ said Zhu Feng, deputy director of the Center for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.

Zhu said Pyongyang’s recent launch was a negotiating chip, not an immediate threat. He said it was intended to stoke tensions abroad in order to improve Pyongyang’s position in future international negotiations.

Weeden said North Korea may want to create the perception that it poses a threat to the United States, but is not likely to go further than that.

‘‘I expect North Korea to milk this situation for everything they can get,’’ he said. ‘‘But I don’t think that perception will be matched by the actual hard work and testing needed to develop and field a reliable, effective weapon system like the ICBMs deployed by the US, Russia and China.’’

North Korea already poses a major security threat to its East Asian neighbors. It has one of the world’s largest standing armies and a formidable if aging arsenal of artillery that could target Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Nearly 30,000 U.S. forces are based in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended with an armistice, not a formal peace treaty.

The North’s short-range rockets could also potentially target another core U.S. ally, Japan.

Darryl Kimball, executive director of the nongovernmental Arms Control Association, said those capabilities, rather than the North’s future ability to strike the U.S., still warrant the most attention.

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