ATOMIC WEDGIE
Trump team douses his ‘fire & fury’ threat N. Korea mocks Don ‘nonsense,’ vows force
President Trump’s reckless talk of unleashing hell on North Korea led his secretaries of state and defense to try to tamp down tensions Wednesday — but North Korea said it was already planning strike on U.S. territory of Guam.
WHITE HOUSE officials and cabinet members tried to ease the public’s fears and tamp down tensions with North Korea on Wednesday as President Trump touted America’s nuclear superiority.
Secretary of State Tillerson sought to scale back the intercontinental saber-rattling and urged calm in the face of Trump’s “fire and fury” comments.
Tillerson said he doesn’t believe there is “any imminent threat” from North Korea, including to the U.S. territory of Guam.
“Americans should sleep well at night,” he added.
North Korean military leaders offered similar assurances to their own people, dismissing Trump’s warnings as a “load of nonsense.”
But Gen. Kim Rak Gyom, the head of North Korea’s rocket command, also said his country was “about to take” military action near Guam.
He said the North is considering firing four intermediate-range ballistic missiles near U.S. military installations and that a concrete plan will be delivered to leader Kim Jong Un in the next week.
Kim, the commander, also mocked Trump as “a guy bereft of reason” and said, “Only absolute force can work on him.”
Defense Secretary James Mattis said North Korea should “cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and destruction of its people.”
His words, while harsh, hinted that America would retaliate against actions from North Korea — not just threats, as Trump had pledged Tuesday.
The President, meanwhile, stood by his tough talk in a series of morning tweets boasting about America’s atomic might.
“My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before ....... Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!” he wrote.
Trump’s claim about that having been his first order is wrong — he included a line about upgrading the nation’s nukes in an executive order after a week in office, after signing about a dozen other orders. And his claims about the upgrade are dubious, since he has only been in office for seven months — not nearly enough time to renovate an arsenal of about 4,000 missiles.
His predecessor Barack Obama implemented a modernization plan that’s expected to run through 2026.
White House sources, meanwhile, told The New York Times that Trump’s assertion that North Korea would suffer “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued making threats was an off-the-cuff remark.
It took staffers by surprise, the paper said, though White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted Trump’s national security team was “well aware of the tone of the statement of the President prior to delivery.” “The words were his own,” but “the tone and strength of the message were discussed beforehand,” she said.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert added to the confusion, saying that the Trump administration was “speaking with one voice” on North Korea. She also scolded the media for wanting to “obsess” over the possibility of imminent nuclear war.
Through it all, there was no indication the Pentagon had any immediate plans of action. And Trump, who is in the middle of a 17-day vacation, was spotted playing golf on his New Jersey course. A small group of protesters gathered across the street from Trump Tower in Midtown, chanting, “Negotiate don’t escalate, diplomacy not war! No nuclear war!”