Hagel Calls Preemptive North Korea Strike a ‘Gamble’ Not to Take

Hitting North Korea with U.S. military strikes to dismantle or disrupt Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons capabilities is a “pretty big gamble I wouldn’t want to take” because of the millions of lives at risk from the likely response, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said.

“I know something about this business, and I know the kind of conventional capability North Korea has,” Hagel, a former Republican senator who led the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, said in an interview published Monday by Defense News. “There would be literally millions of people dead in South Korea, tens of thousands of Americans dead” and “probably Japan doesn’t come out of this without some catastrophe,” he said.

President Donald Trump agreed last month to pause annual joint military drills with South Korea while the country hosts the Winter Olympics starting this week, with North Koreans participating. Still, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis released a nuclear posture review last week that said the U.S. will “continue to field a range of conventional and nuclear capabilities” to hold North Korea’s most important military targets “at risk.”

These include its network of “hardened and deeply buried facilities to secure” Kim’s regime and “its key military and command and control capabilities,” according to the review. Although North Korea’s missile forces “are expanding and increasingly mobile,” the U.S. “has the early warning systems and strike capabilities necessary to degrade” the regime’s “missile capability prior to launch,” the review said.

The Mattis review tracks the Trump administration’s broader national security strategy released last month in its call for a more aggressive approach toward stopping a North Korean missile strike on the U.S., including the possibility of knocking out the weapons before launch.