U.S. said to be ready if North Korea attacks

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said Thursday that the United States military is prepared to respond to an attack from North Korea “should they be needed.”

“I don’t tell the enemy in advance what we are going to do,” he said, adding that in the event of an attack, “we are ready.”

The secretary spoke to reporters at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, also known as DIUx, in Mountain View. His visit came as President Trump doubled down on his promise that North Korea would be met with “fire and fury” in response to a nuclear attack.

Mattis did not comment directly on the president’s remarks this week. But when asked how he would assess the danger from North Korea, the secretary called it “a threat to world peace and global order” and said the human toll from such an attack would be “catastrophic.”

“The best way to show how (the threat) is widely gauged is to look at last weekend when the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to characterize this as a North Korean threat to the world’s community,” he said. “How often do you see France, China, Russia and the U.S. … voting unanimously on any issue?”

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told The Chronicle in an interview that he was confident that there are experts giving Trump advice on the volatile North Korea situation, even if the president has been bellicose in his attacks on the rogue nation.

“It’s very important that we treat this in a very grown-up way,” said Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has traded barbs with Trump on several issues. “We want to make sure that we don’t just retaliate. We have to make people aware that we are ready to fight anyone, anywhere — but we are not going to be the ones who are going to start the fight.”