Madman Kim Jong Un is engaged in a reckless game of brinkmanship with President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Think Mattis will be the one that blinks? Unlikely.
“[North Korea] must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Mattis said in a written statement, adding that Kim’s “actions will continue to be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms race or conflict it initiates.”
North Korea has announced a detailed plan to launch a salvo of ballistic missiles toward the U.S. territory of Guam, a major military hub and home to U.S. bombers. If carried out, it would be the North’s most provocative missile launch to date.
The announcement Thursday warned that the North is finalizing a plan to fire four of its Hwasong-12 missiles over Japan and into waters around the tiny island, which hosts 7,000 U.S. military personnel on two main bases and has a population of 160,000.
Japan and South Korea vowed a strong reaction if the North were to go through with the plan.
It said the plan, which involves the missiles hitting waters 20 to 25 miles from the island, could be sent to leader Kim Jong Un for approval within a week or so. It would be up to Kim whether the move is actually carried out.
It is unclear whether – or exactly why – North Korea would risk firing missiles so close to U.S. territory. Such a launch would almost compel the United States to attempt an intercept and possibly generate further escalation.
North Korea, no stranger to pushing the limits, frequently used extreme rhetoric with warnings of military action to keep former President Barack Obama on his heels for both his terms.
This latest statement raised worries amid threats from both sides.
Following reports that U.S. intelligence suggests the North might be able to pair a nuclear warhead with a missile capable of reaching targets on the United States mainland, Trump warned North Korea that “it faces retaliation with fire and fury unlike any the world has seen before.”
Pyongyang, meanwhile, has been louder in its complaints against a new and tough round of sanctions imposed by the United Nations, with strong U.S. backing, and Washington’s use of Guam as a staging ground for its stealth bombers, which could be used to attack North Korea and are a particularly sore point with the ruling regime in Pyongyang.
Its reported plan is extremely specific, suggesting it is actually plotting a launch.
The report said the Hwasong-12 rockets would fly over Shimane, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures in Japan and travel “1,065 seconds before hitting the waters 30 to 40 kilometers away from Guam.” It said the Korean People’s Army Strategic Force will finalize the plan by mid-August, present it to Kim Jong Un and “wait for his order.”
“We keep closely watching the speech and behavior of the U.S.,” it said.
Such a move would not merely be a test launch, but a demonstration of military capabilities that could easily lead to severe consequences.
South Korea’s military responded by saying North Korea will face a “stern and strong” response from Washington and Seoul. Taking it a step further, Japan’s Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told parliament a missile attack on the U.S. territory would be a Japanese national emergency because it would threaten Japan’s existence as a nation.
If North Korea were to actually carry it out – even if it aimed at hitting the waters off Guam and not the island itself – that would clearly pose a potential threat to U.S. territory and put the United States in a much more complicated situation than it has been during previous missile launches.
Guam lies about 2,100 miles from the Korean Peninsula, and it’s extremely unlikely Kim’s government would risk annihilation with a pre-emptive attack on U.S. citizens. It’s also unclear how reliable North Korea’s missiles would be against such a distant target, but no one was writing off the danger completely.
Washington has been testing its missile defenses in response to the North’s stepped-up development and the current escalation of tensions could lead to pressure for the U.S. military to try to shoot down the North’s missiles in midflight if they are heading toward Guam.
That would likely open up a set of very major problems, including the possibility of both a very high-profile failure or a miscalculation of Washington’s intentions and a more deadly pre-emptive strike by the North – which has missiles able to hit Tokyo and conventional weapons that could devastate South Korea’s capital of Seoul.
The Hwasong-12, which was revealed for the first time at a military parade in April, is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that is believed to have a radius of more than 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles). It can be fired from mobile launchers, making it hard to detect and destroy on the ground.
By launching a salvo of four, the North would be attempting to make it harder for the U.S. to intercept all of the incoming missiles. Its stated flight path over Japan is also very aggressive – it has recently tried to avoid flying over neighboring countries by shooting its missiles up at a very high angle to land in the ocean.
The Associated Press contributed to this article