Trump Threatens Nuclear War on North Korea

FEATURING TIM SHORROCK – Donald Trump made offhand remarks while at his golf club in New Jersey this week in what amounted to a threat of nuclear war with North Korea. Trump said, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Responding to Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s government said it would be “carefully examining” a missile strike on the American territory of Guam which houses a major US military base. North Korea’s state run media said it would, “turn the US mainland into the theater of a nuclear war”

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just hours later tried to tone down the fieriness of his President’s rhetoric saying there was no change to US-North Korea relations and that, “Americans should sleep well at night.”

The exchange of comes on the 72nd anniversary of the US bombing of Nagasaki.

Tim Shorrock, Washington-based journalist who spent part of his youth in South Korea and has been writing about North and South Korea since the late 1970s. He just returned from a two month stay in Gwangju, South Korea, where during the Korean president campaign he interviewed South Korea’s President Moon Jae-In. He writes about US-Korea relations for The Nation and the Korea Center for Investigative Reporting.