Trump says North Korea is 'no longer' a nuclear threat. The Pentagon budget suggests otherwise.
President Trump proclaimed Wednesday that there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea after his talks with Kim Jong Un, but the Defense Department is spending billions of dollars preparing to counter one.
For years, leaders at the Pentagon during both the Obama and Trump administrations have cited North Korea’s nuclear ambitions as one of the foremost threats to the United States and have sought ways to advance the American military’s ability to counter them.
North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests, including the most recent one in 2017 that U.S. officials suspect was a hydrogen bomb, in addition to multiple intercontinental ballistic missile tests. By most accounts, the nation is close to demonstrating an ability to strike the continental United States with a nuclear warhead atop one of those ICBMs.
“North Korea has accelerated its provocative pursuit of nuclear weapons and missile capabilities, and expressed explicit threats to use nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies in the region,” the nuclear weapons strategy that the Trump administration released in February said. “North Korean officials insist that they will not give up nuclear weapons, and North Korea may now be only months away from the capability to strike the United States with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.”
The U.S. intelligence community’s worldwide threat assessment, published the same month, said North Korea would be “among the most volatile and confrontational (weapons of mass destruction) threats to the United States over the next year.”
The roughly $700 billion Pentagon budget includes a number of programs aimed at countering the threat of a North Korean missile hitting the United States or its allies and possibly carrying a nuclear warhead.
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