(CBS/AP) North Korea's missile tests suggested the country can't directly threaten the United States for now. But the Koreans can learn from their mistakes, regardless of whether the tests were posturing, serious military efforts or both, U.S. officials and military experts say.

North Korea has three or four more missiles on launch pads and ready for firing, major South Korean newspapers reported Thursday. The missiles are either short- or medium-range, reported Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea's largest dailies, citing an unidentified senior South Korean official.

Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and President Bush have agreed to cooperate in pushing for U.N. resolutions to impose sanctions on North Korea and Japan plans to seek a G-8 statement to denounce the regime over its missile tests launches.

Japan has called on North Korea to immediately stop testing missiles and return to six-party talks unconditionally.

Japan's Defense Chief, Fukushiro Nukaga, says that "in addition to building monitoring radar networks, we would like to cooperate with the United States and put our joint missile interception into shape as quickly as possible."

Early Thursday, a North Korean envoy to the United Nations
warned other nations that it would regard as an act of war any sanctions that might be imposed on North Korea because of its missile launchings.

"We will be forced to take all-out countermeasures if sanctions are exercised," said Han Song Ryol, deputy chief of North Korea's U.N. mission in New York, according to the Japanese television network TBS.

Han was quoted as saying that the missile launches were part of a regular military drill "to counter escalating acts of provocation from North Korea's enemies... North Korea has the right to test-fire missiles as a sovereign nation, and that will not change in the future."

Another North Korean official - from the Foreign Ministry - took a similar tack, but turns the rhetoric up a bit, saying the purpose of what he calls the "successful missile launch" was to strengthen the country's self defense.

North Korea also vows to take "stronger physical action" against any outside opposition to its missile launch drills.

The reclusive regime accuses the U.S. of stepping up aerial espionage and preparing to start a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula.

"The military and the people of DPKR are further strengthening the military deterrent to mercilessly punish aggressors' provocations," said the Korean Central News Agency. DPRK stands for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Also Thursday, South Korea's unification minister, Lee Jong-seok, said South Korea will press ahead with its policy of engagement with the North despite the communist state's missile tests.

Lee told the National Assembly that Cabinet level meetings between the two Koreas scheduled for next week should go ahead, and that Seoul will press ahead with cross-border projects with North Korea.

"If economic cooperation is undermined, there will be more loss," Lee explained. "I hope that these businesses would not be affected," he added, referring to an industrial complex in North Korea jointly by the two Koreas and sightseeing to a mountain resort in North Korea.

North Korea test-fired a seventh missile on Wednesday, one day after it defied international protests by launching a long-range missile and at least five shorter-range weapons.

The long-range Taepodong-2 missile, the object of intense international attention for more than a month, failed 42 seconds after liftoff, suggesting a catastrophic failure of the rocket's first, or booster, stage.

David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy group, says it was the most likely time for something to go wrong. "The first stage in particular is a new, large complicated stage that's more complicated than anything they've tested," Wright tells CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

The U.S. missile defense system was on alert and under orders to shoot down North Korea's missile if it threatened American territory. But Wright doesn't think it was headed this way.

"It looks like it was flying well south of the continental U.S., and, in fact, it looks like it may have been chosen to fly so it didn't fly over any parts of the United States," he says.

That heartened U.S. officials, since an earlier version of the long-range missile, last tested in 1998, failed later in its flight, apparently due to a third-stage malfunction. A working version of the intercontinental missile could potentially reach the United States with a light payload.

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