Lasers are safer for the following reasons:

Once you point them into sky, it's hard to bring them down. Hence, one could safely distribute the technology to both friends and enemy. Iran can't hit us with a laser (from Iran).

You can have a bunch of lasers and mass produce them for redunancy and lower cost. With rockets to do the same job, that's a pipe dream.

You can distribute lasers all over the west and east coast. Even in Northern Canada and at the US Mexican border (key is mutiplicity of smaller lasers).

Lasers are simply faster than rockets.

Variety of lasers give more options than the cannonball vs. cannonball type of effectiveness that is inherent in "anti-missle missle defense systems".

Lasers have less power than bombs, they don't have the same power as Nuclear Weapons, but it is enough to knock a nuclear missle, especially if you have more than one laser!

No matter how many nuclear missles North Korea has, with an effective laser based missle defense system, this will no longer mean much to America, since the priceless ability to destroy those weapons at a flash would make their efforts at ICBMs pointless. If others adopt the system, others too would render our ICBMs useless. It would render many nuclear weapons obsolete. It would be like they didn't even exist!