South moves to douse tension over North Korea – U.S. arms race

By AKANNI HAMDALAT OPEYEMI with Agency Report

The Government of South Korea has advocated peaceful resolution of the looming crisis between the United States of America and the Republic of North Korea over test of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. South Korea has been a close ally of the US since the buildup of the arms conflicts but has intervened to douse tension in the Peninsula, considering the consequences of war in the region.

Apparently, tension on the Korean Peninsula eased slightly on Monday as South Korea’s President said resolving North Korea’s nuclear ambitions must be done peacefully and U.S. officials played down the risk of an imminent war.

The US has been expressing concern that North Korea is close to achieving its goal of putting the mainland United States within range of a nuclear weapon. This generating tension since North Korea declared that it has acquired missile capacity that can get any state in US.

U.S. President Donald Trump had warned at the weekend that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded” if North Korea acted unwisely after threatening last week to land missiles near the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.

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“There must be no more war on the Korean peninsula. Whatever ups and downs we face, the North Korean nuclear situation must be resolved peacefully,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said at a regular meeting with senior aides and advisers. “I am certain the United States will respond to the current situation calmly and responsibly in a stance that is equal to ours,” he said. While backing Trump’s tough statement, U.S. officials, including National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, played down the risk, on Sunday, of the rhetoric escalating into conflict. “I think we’re not closer to war than a week ago, but we are closer to war than we were a decade ago,” McMaster told ABC News.

“This Week”. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director, Mike Pompeo, said North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, might conduct another missile test but talk of being on the cusp of a nuclear war was overstating the risk. “I’ve seen no intelligence that would indicate that we’re in that place today,” Pompeo told “Fox News Sunday”.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal the United States was adopting a policy of “strategic accountability” towards North Korea, and was applying diplomatic and economic pressures “to achieve the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a dismantling of the regime’s ballistic-missile programs”. “While diplomacy is our preferred means of changing North Korea’s course of action, it is backed by military options,” they said.