WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 (Xinhua) — U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded” to deal with the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula amid escalating tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.
“Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) act unwisely,” Trump tweeted Friday morning.
Trump’s warning came after Pyongyang accused the United States and Japan of reckless behavior earlier in the day.
Pyongyang said it would prepare a plan by mid-August to strike the U.S. territory of Guam with intermediate missiles, the Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday.
Trump’s words on Friday were the latest in a string of warnings unleashed this week against the northeast Asian country.
On Tuesday, Trump issued a controversial warning to the DPRK, saying that threats from the country would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Earlier on Thursday, Trump escalated his threat, claiming that maybe his previous warning “wasn’t tough enough.”
However, top U.S. officials have been trying to play down the growing tensions.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Thursday that the U.S. efforts to deal with the Korean peninsula issue were “diplomatically led,” warning that war with the DPRK would be “catastrophic.”
“Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours,” U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday.
