NATIONAL SECURITY/NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “Senior American officials sent mixed signals on North Korea on Wednesday [8-9-17] as President Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ warning rattled allies and adversaries alike, a sign of his administration’s deep divisions as the outcast state once again threatened to wage nuclear war on the United States.
The president’s advisers calibrated his dire warning with statements that, if not directly contradictory, emphasized different points. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson stressed diplomacy and reassured Americans that they could ‘sleep well at night,’ while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said North Korea risked ‘the end of its regime and the destruction of its people’ if it did not ‘stand down.’
North Korea gave no indication that it would do so. In a statement late Wednesday, the North Korean military dismissed Mr. Trump’s fire-and-fury warning on Tuesday as a ‘load of nonsense’ and said only ‘absolute force’ would work on someone so ‘bereft of reason.’ The military threatened to ‘turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war’ and added that any American strike on North Korean missile and nuclear targets would be ‘mercilessly repelled.’
The statement also said that the North Korean military would finalize a plan by mid-August to fire four midrange missiles into the waters off the Pacific island of Guam, a United States territory used as a strategic base, to create a ‘historic enveloping fire.’ “
-Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris, “Deep Divisions Emerge in Trump Administration as North Korea Threatens War,” The New York Times online, Aug. 9, 2017