« The North Koreans having nukes is a bad thing and we don’ t want it. But if we lose that one, we survive it. »
But a nuclear armed North Korea wouldn’t be the end of the world, according to some senior military officials.
“We can deter them, » Adm. Dennis Blair, the former head of US Pacific Command, said of North Korea at a National Committee for US-China Relations event. « They may be developing 10 to 15 nuclear weapons. We have 2,000. They can do a lot of damage to the US, but there won’ t be any North Korea left in the event of a nuclear exchange. That’s not a good regime survival strategy and even Kim Jong Un would understand that.”
The US has to live with the fact that Russia, the world’s second greatest nuclear power, openly opposes the US’s foreign policy in nearly every dimension. And it lives with the fact that Pakistan, a country rife with corruption and Islamist groups gaining traction within and around their borders, has nuclear weapons.
A senior Defense Department official with expertise in nuclear strategy told Business Insider that while the US says it cannot and will not accept a North Korea armed with a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, that amounts more to an opening position in an ongoing negotiation than an intention to use military force in order to stop it.
« You never undermine your official position going in, » the official told Business Insider.
