‘Locked and loaded’ − but talking in secret
WASHINGTON • The United States has been secretly engaged in an attempt at backchannel diplomacy with North Korea for months, despite the increasingly bellicose rhetoric between Washington and Pyongyang.
In the latest round of escalating threats, Donald Trump said the U.S. military was “locked and loaded” — a phrase popularized in the 1949 John Wayne film Sands of Iwo Jima — while Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, accused him of “driving the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war.”
Speaking to reporters Friday afternoon, Trump all but drew a red line that would trigger swift U.S. action.
“If he utters one threat in the form of an overt threat — which by the way he has been uttering for years and his family has been uttering for years — or he does anything with respect to Guam or anyplace else that’s an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it and he will regret it fast,” Trump said.
In an earlier tweet from his golf course in New Jersey, Trump said: “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!”
The other path may have been a reference to a senior U.S. diplomat who has been engaged in back-channel diplomacy.
There have been regular contacts between Joseph Yun, the U.S. envoy for North Korea policy, and Pak Song Il, a senior North Korean diplomat, at Pyongyang’s UN mission.
It is known as the “New York channel” as the two men met in that city, and could form the foundation for future negotiations.
It was Yun who went to Pyongyang in June to discuss the release of Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old U.S. student imprisoned in North Korea. Warmbier returned in a coma and suffering brain damage, and died soon after his return to the U.S. He is the only U.S. diplomat in contact with any North Korean counterpart.
Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, hinted at the potential route for dialogue last week when he said: “We have other means of communication open to them, to certainly hear from them if they have a desire to want to talk.”
Trump’s senior advisers stressed Friday that Washington would prefer a diplomatic solution. Jim Mattis, the U.S. defence secretary, warned that war with North Korea would be “catastrophic.”
“The American effort is diplomatically led, it has diplomatic traction, it is gaining diplomatic results and I want to stay right there right now,” Mattis said in California.
But the Pentagon confirmed Friday that a huge annual joint exercise by the U.S. and South Korea would go ahead as planned in 10 days’ time.
Trump has said he would not allow North Korea to develop a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the U.S. But Pyongyang’s nuclear program has advanced rapidly, with two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month and intelligence reports alleging that it now has miniaturized its nuclear warheads, which extends the range of its missiles and potentially brings U.S. targets into reach.
Earlier this week, Trump promised “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if North Korea threatened the U.S. or its allies. Pyongyang responded by saying it may fire four missiles to land off the coast of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, within days.
A newspaper on Guam had “14 minutes” as its headline, referring to the time North Korean missiles would take to reach the island of 160,000 people.
Japan began deploying land-based Patriot surfaceto-air interceptor missiles, including in Hiroshima, as North Korean missiles headed for Guam would pass over its airspace.