Pentagon: North Korea Can Now Hit US With Nuke, ‘We are ready for Kim’

Admiral Bill Gortney, a former fighter pilot as well as the head of NORAD has called on Congress to approve next years military expenditure budget or risk the country’s missile defense. While he feels comfortable about America’s ability to shoot any North Korean missiles from the sky, we’d need to upkeep our own missile defenses, or the task could become difficult. Previous threats from North Korea have been ignored due to their inability to miniaturize and deliver a nuclear payload.

The speech came the same day as the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security released a report claiming that Pyongyang has sufficient fissile material for 22 nuclear weapons, namely 34 kilograms of plutonium and 240 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium.

Yukiya Amano, the Director-General  IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, said this week that the organization had noticed increased activity at North Korea’s primary nuclear site in Yongbyon, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported. He also urged the authoritarian country to comply with restrictions imposed by the international community.

North Korea, whose belligerence has waxed and waned over the past decade, has simultaneously claimed its nuclear program is peaceful in nature while engaging in bellicose rhetoric, such as that published this week in an essay signed by Kim, in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which stated that the country “should produce more powerful cutting-edge arms of our kind and tirelessly strengthen self-defense nuclear deterrence while rigorously making war-fighting preparations involving the entire population.”

While the United States is hesitating to get involved with the war in Syria, a war with North Korea is another story. Most of the threats from Pyongyang are nothing more than scare tactics. Should they ever be dumb enough to fire something at the United States, there would be consequences.

Source: rt.com