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While giving lip-service to the idea of diplomacy and insisting that “nobody’s looking for war,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford declared the US military to be ready to provide a full range of military options against North Korea.
These comments came following a flurry of threats by President Trump and other officials over the past week, which have fueled fear of a nuclear war with North Korea. While most officials seem desperate to downplay such a risk at this point, Dunford continued to maintain that “viable military options” exist for the US.
Dunford did not provide specifics about these “viable” military options in the open briefing, but had a secondary “invited press event” afterwards about which little is yet known, and for which no transcript was released to the public.
Experts and analysts have been pouring over the “military options” since the threats began, however, and have come pretty much uniformly to the conclusion that no option exists for a limited war, and that any US attack on North Korea, no matter how limited, would quickly escalate into a full-scale war, with disastrous consequences.
