North Korea on Thursday announced a detailed plan to launch a volley of ballistic missiles toward the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, a major military hub and home to U.S. bombers, and dismissed President Donald Trump's threats of "fire and fury" if it doesn't back down.
The announcement, made in the name of a general who heads North Korea's rocket command, warned the North is preparing a plan to fire four of its Hwasong-12 missiles over Japan and into waters around the tiny island, which hosts 7,000 U.S. military personnel on two main bases and has a population of 160,000.
It said the plan could be finalized within a week or so and would then go to leader Kim Jong Un for approval. It would be up to Kim whether the move is actually carried out. It said the missiles would hit waters 30 to 40 kilometers (19 to 25 miles) away from the island.
It is unclear whether North Korea would risk firing missiles so close to U.S. territory, which could provoke countermeasures and further escalation.
North Korea frequently uses extremely bellicose rhetoric with warnings of military action to keep its adversaries on their heels. It generally couches its threats with language stating it will not attack the United States unless it has been attacked first or has determined an attack is imminent.
But the statement raised worries amid a barrage of threats from both sides.
Following reports that U.S. intelligence suggests the North might be able to pair a nuclear warhead with a missile capable of reaching targets on the United States mainland, Trump warned North Korea that "it faces retaliation with fire and fury unlike any the world has seen before."
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Pyongyang, meanwhile, has been louder in its complaints against a new and tough round of sanctions imposed on it by the United Nations, with strong U.S. backing, and Washington's use of Guam as a staging ground for its stealth bombers, which could be used to attack North Korea and are a particularly sore point with the rulers in Pyongyang.
Even so, its reported plan to launch missiles toward Guam is extremely unusual.
The report said the Hwasong-12 rockets would fly over Shimane, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures in Japan and travel "1,065 seconds before hitting the waters 30 to 40 kilometers away from Guam."
It said the Korean People's Army Strategic Force will finalize the plan by mid-August, present it to Kim Jong Un and "wait for his order."
"We keep closely watching the speech and behavior of the U.S.," it said.
Such a move would not merely be a test launch, but a demonstration of military capabilities in a manner than could easily lead to severe consequences.
If North Korea were to actually carry out such a launch — even if it aimed at hitting the waters off the island and not the island itself — that would clearly pose a potential threat to U.S. territory and put the United States in a much more complicated situation than it has been during previous missile launches.
Guam lies about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) from the Korean Peninsula, and it's extremely unlikely Kim's government would risk annihilation with a pre-emptive attack on U.S. citizens. It's also unclear how reliable North Korea's missiles would be against such a distant target, but no one was writing off the danger completely.
Washington has been testing its missile defenses in response to the North's stepped-up development and the current escalation of tensions could lead to pressure for the U.S. military to try to shoot down the North's missiles in midflight if they are heading toward Guam.
That would likely open up a set of very major problems, including the possibility of both a very high-profile failure or a miscalculation of Washington's intentions and a more deadly pre-emptive strike by the North — which has missiles able to hit Tokyo and conventional weapons that could devastate South Korea's capital of Seoul.
The Hweasong-12, which was revealed for the first time at a military parade in April, is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that is believed to have a range of more than 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles). It can be fired from mobile launchers, making it hard to detect and destroy on the ground.
By launching a volley of four, the North would be attempting to make it harder for the U.S. to intercept all of the incoming missiles.
Washington, meanwhile, has been giving out mixed signals of what its intensions might be.
While Trump was threatening annihilation and boasting from the New Jersey golf resort where he's vacationing that he has made the U.S. nuclear arsenal "far stronger and more powerful than ever before," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to calm the sense of crisis.
Speaking earlier Wednesday on his way home from Asia, he insisted the U.S. isn't signaling a move toward military action.
"Americans should sleep well at night," Tillerson told reporters. "Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours."
But then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ratcheted the rhetoric back up, calling on Pyongyang to "cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people." As seldom as it is for a president to speak of using nuclear missiles, the reference to the "destruction" of a foreign people is equally rare.
North Korea immediately called Trump's rhetoric a "load of nonsense" that was aggravating a grave situation.
A North Korean official also took aim at Trump's working vacation.
Gen. Kim Rak Gyom, commander of the North's strategic rocket forces, made the insults via state media Thursday. He said Trump is "extremely getting on the nerves" of his soldiers by making comments that showed his "senility" again.
Kim said "sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason who is going senile."
