Ex-US Defense Chief Suggests Military Action Against North Korea

The United States should consider military action against North Korea if China and South Korea refuse to prod Pyongyang to end its nuclear weapons program, former US defense secretary William Perry proposed. Although the move is dangerous, there is no alternative left if China and South Korea, the two key economic lifelines to North Korea, do not join any US-led "diplomatic coercive" action against Pyongyang, he told a Congressional hearing. Perry, the Pentagon chief under former president Bill Clinton, said the United States should consider destroying a large reactor under construction in North Korea capable of making about 10 nuclear bombs a year. In addition to the Yongbyon reactor, which produces spent fuel that can be "reprocessed" to yield plutonium for a nuclear weapon, Pyongyang is reportedly building a large reactor in Taechon. Perry said that the danger of the North Korean nuclear weapons program was by now obvious to China and South Korea and that they should be willing to join the United States in any concerted diplomatic initiative. "An additional inducement for China and South Korea would be the concern that if they did not provide the coercion, the United States might take the only meaningful coercive action available to it -- destroying the reactor before it could come on line," Perry said.