SEOUL — A U.S. Navy strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier was making its way towards the Korean peninsula Sunday “to maintain readiness” as Kim Jong Un’s regime in North Korea prepared to mark key anniversaries this coming week
Over the weekend, North Korea said it was not afraid of military strikes like those the United States launched on Syria last week, saying it could defend itself with its “tremendous military muscle with a nuclear force.”
In this atmosphere, the Carl Vinson strike group, which includes a carrier air wing and two guided-missile destroyers, was ordered to travel to the “western Pacific.” When the group left Singapore on Saturday, it was bound for Australia before receiving the new orders.
The Vinson group last month participated in joint drills with the South Korean military to prepare for a sudden change on the peninsula — including the collapse of the North Korean regime or an invasion.
The North has conventional artillery massed on its side of the demilitarized zone that bisects the Korean Peninsula, giving it the capacity to inflict serious damage on greater Seoul, a metropolitan area of 20 million people that lies just 30 miles south of the DMZ.
What Are America’s Options on North Korea?
The National Security Council has presented President Donald Trump with options to respond to North Korea's nuclear program — including putting American nukes in South Korea or killing dictator Kim Jong-un, multiple top-ranking intelligence and military officials told NBC New
"We have 20 years of diplomacy and sanctions under our belt that has failed to stop the North Korean program," one senior intelligence official involved in the review told NBC News."I'm not advocating pre-emptive war, nor do I think that the deployment of nuclear weapons buys more for us than it costs," but he stressed that the U.S. was dealing with a "war today" situation.
"I don't think that [deploying nuclear weapons] is a good idea. I think that it will only inflame the view from Pyongyang," retired Adm. James Stavridis told NBC News. "I don't see any upside to it because the idea that we would use a nuclear weapon even against North Korea is highly unlikely."
Another option is to target and kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and other senior leaders in charge of the country's missiles and nuclear weapons and decision-making.
Adopting such an objective has huge downsides, said Lippert, who also served as an assistant defense secretary under President Barack Obama.
"Discussions of regime change and decapitation...tend to cause the Chinese great pause of concern and tends to have them move in the opposite direction we would like them to move in terms of pressure," he said.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tru ... ea-n743571
... There’s a reason why Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all considered preemptive military strikes against North Korea’s nuclear sites and all eventually decided against it. As North Korea’s nuclear infrastructure has become more sophisticated, it has grown increasingly difficult to design a military campaign that could eliminate (as opposed to merely slow down) the entire program—especially now that the Kim regime has spread out its nuclear-weapons arsenal, facilities for enriching weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, and mobile systems for launching missiles. “It’s very hard to strike [these components] because you don’t know where they are.”“It gets pretty ugly, pretty fast,” ... There could “be millions of casualties.”
North Korea could retaliate against U.S. strikes by unleashing a barrage of artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul, which is one of the largest cities in the world and roughly as far from the demilitarized zone separating the two countries as Washington, D.C., is from Baltimore. The North Korean military could place chemical weapons on that artillery. It could also target U.S. military bases in South Korea and Japan with ballistic missiles—potentially nuclear-tipped missiles.
