«Temptation to ‘deal’ with North Korea with a pre-emptive attack, is strong…»
Authored by Alex Christoforou via TheDuran.com,
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has said that he agrees with the aggressive statements President Trump has made towards North Korea.
The former Secretary of State said that the Trump Administration “will hit that fork in the road, and the temptation to deal with it with a pre-emptive attack” against North Korea “is strong, and the argument is rational.”
PJ Media reports…
The Trump administration has signaled that North Korea would be crossing a red line if it developed nuclear capability for its intercontinental ballistic missile program. Yet some policy officials and military experts claim that North Korea has already crossed that line, or is at least very close to attaching nuclear warheads to its missiles.
Kissinger offered his thoughts on the impending “fork in the road,” in which the administration may consider pre-emptive military action or increasingly tighter sanctions against the regime.
“We will hit that fork in the road, and the temptation to deal with it with a pre-emptive attack is strong, and the argument is rational, but I have seen no public statement by any leading official,” Nixon’s secretary of State told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “But in any event, my own thinking, I would be very concerned by any unilateral American war at the borders of China and Russia, in which we are not supported by a significant part of the world, or at least of the Asian world.”
The current North Korean trajectory, Kissinger continued, could lead to nuclear proliferation throughout Asia, as he believes South Korea will not accept being the only Korea without nuclear capability. Japan will follow suit, he said.
“Then we’re living in a new world, in which technically competent countries with adequate command structures are possessing nuclear weapons in an area where there are considerable national disagreements,” Kissinger said. “That is a new world that will require new thinking by us.”
This would drive a rethinking of the entire U. S. nuclear deterrent posture, Kissinger said, as the current strategy assumes only one potential nuclear threat. One little country in North Korea does not pose such an extreme threat, Kissinger said, but the situation has the potential to evolve into a nuclear landscape the world has never seen.
In the coming weeks, the Trump administration is expected to release its Nuclear Policy Review, which is rumored to call for new nuclear weapons capability, more useable nuclear weapons and expanded conditions under which the U. S. would contemplate using a nuclear weapon.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked President Reagan’s Secretary of State George P. Shultz if he still believes that the U. S. should further reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons. Schultz said a nuclear exchange would have “devastating” impacts on the planet, “so I continue to believe that we should be trying to eliminate them.”
“We were getting there for a while, and now that’s all stopped, and now our problem is proliferation, so this is a new problem we have to work out and work at it hard,” Schultz said.
