The U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test, multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
Then, China’s response to this disturbing news (from Reuters) :
China said on Friday tension over North Korea had to be stopped from reaching an "irreversible and unmanageable stage" as a U.S. aircraft carrier group steamed toward the region amid fears the North may conduct a sixth nuclear weapons test.
Meanwhile, North Korea has warned, as a US carrier group moves towards striking range of the Korean peninsula, that the US is,
“threatening peace and security of the peninsula and pushing the situation there to the brink of a war… This has created a dangerous situation in which a thermo-nuclear war may break out any moment."
What the North Korean government statement above likely means is this — by openly stating its intent to use military force to prevent any further North Korean nuclear tests, The Trump Administration risks forcing North Korea’s leaders towards the “use it or lose it” point of no return.
If the United States is willing to use military force to preempt a North Korean nuclear test, North Korea must therefore take seriously the prospect that the United States is also ready to make an attempt to preemptively neutralize North Korea’s existing stock of nuclear weapons — all of them.
That’s what the North Korean government warning that “a thermo-nuclear war may break out any moment” likely means — North Korean may have to use its nuclear weapons before the United States can knock them out.
I don't know what the solution is but, in this particular situation, US brinksmanship is very close to insane.
The North Korean regime is hardly stable and, while Donald J. Trump is certainly no John F. Kennedy, Kim Jong Un resembles even less the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khruschev who Kennedy faced off with in the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly plunged the world into the hell of all-out thermonuclear war.
How lucky do we feel ?
What’s especially troubling is that president Donald J. Trump seems intent on waging this bet even as multiple investigations on Trump/Russia/organized crime triangulate with increasing precision upon his presidency. This North Korea crisis would appear a desperate gamble, with millions of lives at stake, to shore up an increasingly shaky presidency.
And, the big problem is that the basic US options are in the open, fully on display in sabre-rattling bloodthirsty op-eds from the Neocon right : preemption, “decapitation”. North Koreans can read.
I, for one, am not betting on these dice. They’re loaded, towards radioactive hell.