North Korea says U.S. considering limited pre-emptive strike

GENEVA (Reuters) - North Korea accused the United States on Tuesday of seeking to aggravate the situation on the divided Korean peninsula by “deploying large nuclear assets” nearby and lay the ground for a possible pre-emptive strike against it.

In view of the nature and scale of U.S. military reinforcements, they are designed to make a pre-emptive strike against the DPRK,” North Korean diplomat Ju Yong Chol told the U.N.-sponsored Conference on Disarmament, referring to his country’s official name the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“U.S. officials including the defense secretary and the CIA director repeatedly talked about DPRK nuclear and missile threat to justify their argument for a military option and a new concept of a so-called ‘bloody nose’, a limited pre-emptive strike on the DPRK is under consideration within the U.S. administration,” Ju said.

GENEVA (Reuters) - North Korea may be only months away from being able to strike the United States with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile and its atomic weapons program must be shut down, a senior U.S. disarmament official said on Tuesday.

U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood, addressing the U.N.-sponsored Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, also warned that arsenals in China and Russia were expanding.

“Russia, China and North Korea are growing their stockpiles, increasing the prominence of nuclear weapons in their security strategies, and - in some cases - pursuing the development of new nuclear capabilities to threaten other peaceful nations,” he said.

North Korea “may now be only months away from the capability to strike the U.S. with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles”.