North Korea threat after
Trump vows ‘fire and fury’
Kim Jong Un said to be
considering strike on Guam
President Donald
Trump talks about North Korea during a briefing on the opioid crisis on Tuesday
© AP
North Korea said its
leader Kim Jong Un was weighing whether to strike the US Pacific territory of
Guam, just hours after Donald Trump vowed to meet threats made by North Korea
“with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
The comments, released via
North Korea’s state news agency, appear to escalate a dangerous game of chicken
as the US struggles to bring the nuclear aspirant and its rapidly developing
missile programme into line.
The Korean People’s Army
said the strike plan would be “put into practice in a multi-current and
consecutive way any moment” once the supreme leader had made a decision about
targeting the small island territory of fewer than 200,000 people, which lies
south of Japan.“
The KPA strategic force is
now carefully examining the operational plan for making an enveloping fire at
the areas around Guam with medium-to-long-range strategic ballistic rocket
Hwasong-12 in order to contain the US major military bases on Guam, including
the Andersen Air Force base,” said the KPA, referring to a missile it first
tested in May.
US strategic bombers
“threaten and blackmail [North Korea] through their frequent visits to the sky
above South Korea”, the KPA added. “It is a daydream for the US to think that
its mainland is an invulnerable heavenly kingdom.”
President Trump had
earlier told reporters that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the
United States”, following reports Pyongyang had cracked one of the final
technological challenges in nuclear missile design by successfully
miniaturising the atomic warhead.
The intelligence
assessment, reported by The Washington Post, underlines the grave threat that
the Trump administration has spent the past seven months striving to stem.North
Korea best not make any more threats to the United States . . . they will be
met by fire, fury and, frankly, power the likes of which this world has never
seen before President Donald Trump.
Mr Trump’s comments drew
criticism from political opponents, who accused him of baiting the paranoid
North Korean regime under Mr Kim, who predicates his rule on his missile
programme and threats to the US, which it frames as an imperial aggressor.“
I take exception to the
president’s comments because you [have] got to be sure that you can do what you
say you’re going to do,” John McCain, Republican senator and chairman of the
armed services committee, told reporters, adding it brings the US “closer to
confrontation”.
Mr Trump’s comments carry
an eerie echo of those made by President Harry Truman after he told the
American public in 1945 that the US had dropped the world’s first atomic bomb
on Hiroshima following Japan’s failure to meet a US ultimatum: “If they do not
now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of
which has never been seen on this earth.”
Chuck Schumer, the
Democratic leader in the Senate, said: “We need to be firm and deliberate with
North Korea, but reckless rhetoric is not a strategy to keep America safe.”
James Mattis, the US
defence secretary, and senior Pentagon officials have warned of the cost of war
with North Korea: US allies South Korea and Japan are within range of the
Pyongyang’s arsenal of nuclear, conventional and biochemical weapons.The report
that US intelligence believes North Korea has miniaturised nuclear weapons so
it can fit them to its growing arsenal of medium and long-range missiles, which
are at various stages of development, will only add to concerns. It said the
Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the 17 agencies that make up the US
intelligence community, made the initial assessment. The report also says the
US believes North Korea now has up to 60 nuclear weapons.
The Office of the Director
of National Intelligence, which heads the US intelligence community, declined
to comment and the DIA did not immediately respond to requests.
“We’re not sure if [the
assessment] reflects the views of the entire intelligence community,” said
Bruce Klingner, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst at The Heritage
Foundation. In 1999, he predicted North Korea would be able to hit the US by
2015 and has previously warned that the US regularly under-assessed the threat
from North Korea.
“There seems to have been
a tendency over the years to downplay the threat given repeated failures [of]
missile launches, with the presumption that North Korea couldn’t accomplish
what other nations have done,” said Mr Klingner. He said the autocratic state
was regularly “referred to as the hardest of the hard targets in the
intelligence community”.
The US assessment goes
further than a warning by Japan on Tuesday, which only went as far as
concluding that it was “possible” that North Korea had already achieved the
miniaturisation of nuclear weapons.
Robert Litwak, director of
international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, who has studied North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, said the country
had taken “another major step” that would allow it to threaten the US mainland.
“
North Korea now is on the
cusp of a nuclear breakout but there is time to alter the trajectory of that
technological advance — it took the US years to master these complex and
integrated technologies and that creates a space, a potential political space,
for diplomacy,” he said.
North Korea tested its
first intercontinental ballistic missile — the Hwasong-14 — last month, which
is believed to have the range to reach at least Alaska and possibly as far as
the US east coast, escalating the threat further and prompting Washington to co-ordinate
a global response.
Mr Trump tweeted earlier
on Tuesday that “after many years of failure, countries are coming together to
finally address the dangers posed by North Korea”.
Rex Tillerson, US
secretary of state, is seeking to stitch a broad coalition of Asian countries
against the North Korean threat on his trip to Manila, while also raising the
prospect of talks should North Korea forgo its nuclear ambitions.
The US also secured
support at the weekend from both China and Russia for unprecedented UN economic
sanctions via a broad export ban that seeks to deprive North Korea of a third
of its revenues.
Mr Litwak, who has
previously described North Korea as a failed state with nuclear weapons, said
the most the US could probably hope for is that the country might feasibly halt
its nuclear programme as an interim step, rather than dismantle it altogether.
“A freeze would be a
diplomatic sweetspot,” he said.North Korea also appeared to dismiss any
possibility of negotiation with Washington, saying:
“The strategic weapons
that the DPRK manufactured at the cost of blood and sweat, risking everything,
are not a bargaining thing for getting acknowledgment from others.”
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario