DONALD Trump has declared that his ‘fire and fury’ warning to North Korea may not have been tough enough. But what happens if the US attacks North Korea?
The US President’s unprecedented rhetoric on North Korea has already pushed Kim Jong-un’s army to prepare a missile strike near the US Pacific territory of Guam.
With neither Donald Trump nor Kim Jong-un backing down, there are fears that the war of words could lead to armed conflict and even nuclear war.
America has not ruled out the dire military option after US intelligence found that Pyongyang has now developed nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A pre-emptive US attack on North Korea could lead to a series of attacks and counter-attacks, escalating all the way the nuclear war on the Korean peninsula.
Lord David Alton, who founded the British-DPRK All-Party Parliamentary Group, is alarmed by the ‘extraordinary increase in rhetoric’ between the White House and Pyongyang.
Lord Alton said: “We are now in a game of very dangerous brinkmanship. The law of unintended consequences is thing that I fear most.”
The peer, who has visited North Korea, referred to the danger of a ‘Sarajevo moment’ - the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that lead to World War One.
“When there is a stray shot fired that no-one expected… that can lead to unimaginable, catastrophic consequences," he told Sky News.
“I mean think Hiroshima, think Nagasaki and then you have some idea of the scale of what could happen on the Korean peninsula.”
The Korean War killed more than three million people and ended in a truce in 1953, leaving South Korea and North Korea technically in a state of war.
Lord Alton said: “We don’t want to see history repeating itself, which is surely why it is in everybody’s interests to try and step back from the brink.”
The North Korea expert called for a “deescalation of the nuclear stand-off” amid fears that an attack on either side could lead to war.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has sought to downplay the prospect of any immediate military conflict saying the “American people should sleep well at night”.
He said: "I think what the president was just reaffirming is that the United States has the capability to fully defend itself from any attack, and our allies, and we will do so.”
US National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is said to believe the overwhelming US and allied military superiority in the Western Pacific can be used to deter North Korea.
People familiar with his thinking told Reuters that he subscribes to the view that despite Kim’s bluster, he is a rational actor who is seeking to deter an attack on North Korea, not to attack the US.
When asked about the prospect of a ‘preventative war’ last week, Mr McMaster confirmed that the US was considering all options including the 'military option'.
The US could theoretically administer a military hammer blow in a bid to take out North Korea’s nuclear weapons and Kim Jong-un’s regime.
But an American effort to crush North Korea runs the risk of causing one of history’s worst mass civilian killings, with war engulfing the Korean peninsula and Japan.
“When you’re discussing nuclear issues and the potential of a nuclear attack, even a 1 percent chance of failure has potentially catastrophically high costs,” Abe Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia under Barack Obama, told the Atlantic.
North Korea has hidden nuclear stockpiles, missiles, artillery batteries, chemical and biological weapons and a huge, well-trained and well-equipped army.