White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster said in an interview Tuesday that the United States doesn’t want to risk coexisting with a nuclear North Korea.
“We can’t tolerate that risk,” he told CBS in an interview Tuesday morning. “If North Korea has a nuclear weapon, who are you going to try to prevent getting one? Look at the regime, the hostility of this regime to the whole world.”
When asked whether Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s high profile disagreements with President Donald Trump undermine him when working overseas, McMaster said no.
“The President has made very clear that on North Korea for example, now is not the time to talk,” McMaster responded. “And what he means is, there can’t be negotiations under these current conditions … The problem is now that their programs have advanced so far we don’t have time to do that again and so we can’t repeat the failed pattern of the past.”
On Monday, White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said the US believes North Korea was behind the “WannaCry” cyber-attack against the US and almost every other country in the world earlier this year.
And then on Tuesday during a briefing on the cyberattack he said the US does not have many more options — “short of starving the people of North Korea to death” — to punish North Korea for its behavior.
Asked about the consequences of North Korea’s actions, Bossert said: “At this point, North Korea has done everything wrong as an actor on a global stage can do. President Trump has used just about everything you can use, short of starving the people of North Korea to death, to change their behavior. So, we don’t have a lot of room left here to apply pressure to change their behavior.”
Their comments come after Tillerson spoke at a special meeting of the UN Security Council on Friday, urging tougher international action to rein in Pyongyang and confronting North Korea’s ambassador to the UN over his claims that the US is to blame for tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Tillerson said the US would require Pyongyang to achieve a period of quiet before the US would engage in talks, clarifying confusion created earlier in the week when he said he would talk without preconditions if North Korea was willing. That comment drew pushback from the White House.