North Korea may be just months away from being able to hit the US mainland with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, a senior American disarmament official said Tuesday – as Pyongyang said Washington was considering a pre-emptive strike against it.
US envoy Robert Wood, addressing the UN-sponsored Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, also warned that arsenals in China and Russia were expanding.
“Russia, China and North Korea are growing their stockpiles, increasing the prominence of nuclear weapons in their security strategies, and, in some cases, pursuing the development of new nuclear capabilities to threaten other peaceful nations,” he said, according to Reuters.
Kim Jong Un’s rogue regime “may now be only months away from the capability to strike the US with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles,” he said.
The hermit kingdom poses an “urgent and unpredictable threat to the United States, allies and partners” and its nuclear program must be “completely, verifiably and irreversibly eliminated,” he added.
Wood’s dire warning comes about two weeks after CIA director Mike Pompeo made a similar prediction – telling CBS that “North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is continuing to expand, advance, become more powerful, more capable, more reliable.
Asked how long Kim could strike the US, Pompeo said a “handful of months.”
North Korea has carried out six nuclear bomb tests between 2006 and last year, as well as a bevy of ballistic missile launches. Despite an international outcry and crippling sanctions, Pyongyang has refused to scale back its nuclear ambitions.
In retaliation to Wood’s words, North Korea said the US was planning a “pre-emptive strike” and worsening the situation by shoring up “large nuclear assets” in South Korea.
“In view of the nature and scale of US military reinforcements, they are designed to make a pre-emptive strike against the DPRK,” North Korean diplomat Ju Yong Chol told the talks, referring to his country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“US officials including the defense secretary and the CIA director repeatedly talked about DPRK nuclear and missile threat to justify their argument for a military option and a new concept of a so-called ‘bloody nose’, a limited pre-emptive strike on the DPRK is under consideration within the UN administration,” Ju said.
Wood took the floor to respond: “If you claim to want peace, end your nuclear and ballistic missile tests and stop your provocative behavior and threats.”
The North is under tightening UN Security Council resolutions for its banned nuclear and ballistic missile programs, but relations with the South have eased as the Winter Olympic Games are set to open Friday.