U.S. top military officer says N. Korea nuke threat ‘just reckless’

PanARMENIAN.Net - North Korea’s bellicose rhetoric and threats, while worrisome, appear to fit a decades-long pattern of provocation followed by uneasy peace, the top U.S. military officer said Friday, April 5, according to The Associated Press.

“I wouldn’t say I see anything to lead me to believe that this is a different kind of cycle,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview after speaking at a ceremony installing Gen. David Rodriquez as chief of U.S. Africa Command.

Dempsey’s remarks suggested that he does not believe the situation is headed toward war, despite a series of threatening statements by the North, including a declaration this week that its military is authorized to launch a nuclear attack on the United States.

Other U.S. officials have said this week they see no North Korean preparations for large-scale military action.

Dempsey called the North’s nuclear threat “just reckless” and contrasted such talk with what he described as measured moves by the U.S. to deter the North and to reassure South Korea.

“Our moves have been largely defensive and exclusively intended to reassure our allies,” he said, referring in part to the announcement that a more advanced missile defense system, designed to knock down hostile missiles in the upper atmosphere and beyond, would be deployed to Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific that hosts U.S. forces.

Despite downplaying the North Korean threats, Dempsey said there is no room to be casual about the current tensions on the Korean peninsula. He noted, for example, that the North’s threat to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. “is new” and is worrisome, given the North’s development of ballistic missiles as well as nuclear devices. He said it is not clear that they have reached the point where they can fit a nuclear warhead atop a missile that could reach distant targets.

“The combination of that makes it very reckless” to threaten a nuclear attack, he said.

Asked how the U.S. is dealing with that, he said, “We’ll live up to our alliance obligations and protect our national interests, and that’s not being bellicose, that’s being very matter-of-fact.”

Dempsey said another troublesome factor is the North’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, who came to power after his father’s death in December 2011 and is a grandson of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung. He said U.S. officials do not know who in his inner circle influences Kim.

“Though we’ve always said that North Korea has been a bit opaque to us, in the past we’ve understood their leadership and the influencers a little better than we do today,” he said. “And so the extent to which this cycle (of provocation) is a little more unpredictable, it’s because of him. We know less about him. But the pattern is very similar.”

Dempsey said that in preparation for a trip to Beijing in a few weeks, he recently spoke by phone to his Chinese counterpart about the North Korea problem, among others, and that this will be on the agenda when he makes his first visit as Joint Chiefs chairman.

“What I’m not going to do is go over there and deliver the traditional talking point of: ‘You need to get your southern neighbor under control,’” he said, adding that it’s pretty clear China cannot compel North Korea to act differently.

“I would rather take the opportunity to gain a little deeper understanding of what are the Chinese issues” with the North Koreans, he said.