US should consider military options against N Korea: Perry

US should consider military options against N Korea: Perry

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States should consider a range of coercive measures against North Korea, including possible military action, for diplomacy to have a chance of success, former US defense secretary William Perry said Thursday.
Perry emphasized that he was not recommending military action against North Korea now but said the United States should at least consider escalating to military action if other lesser coercive measures prove ineffective.
"We could have stopped this last nuclear test if we had chosen to do so. We could have stopped the first one had we chosen to do so," he told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"That requires a military action, and I'm not recommending military action. But somewhere along in this series of coercive actions, one can imagine an escalation, and if the ones that are less do not succeed, we have to be willing to consider the other ones," he said.
He noted that North Korea has not yet tested a missile with a nuclear weapon, a difficult technical achievement, and said preemptive strikes to stop such tests was another option that could be considered.
Perry served as defense secretary from 1994-96 during a similar confrontation with North Korea that ended in the first nuclear disarmament accord with North Korea in 1994, only narrowly avoiding US military action.
Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and Perry's co-author in a study on US nuclear policy, said he agreed with Perry, but cautioned that the use of force was fraught with the risk of unintended consequences.
In a question and answer session, Perry said the US approach toward North Korea in the six party talks had failed, and there could be no return to business as usual.
"Having said that, I do believe that diplomacy still has a chance of success, but only if it is robust and only if its robustness includes some meaningful coercion on opponents," he said.
"I recognize that diplomacy has a much steeper hill to climb now than it did in 2003 because they now have a bomb," he said, referring to the last crisis with North Korea.
"Then we had the option of stopping the production of plutonium. Now the plutonium has been produced and it is located somewhere we know not where. So that option has now disappeared," he said.
But he said the United States should not accept a nuclear armed North Korea.
He said the United States needs to hear an "an unambiguous and clear condemnation" of North Korea by the UN Security Council, and that any rebuke had to be more than "an exercise in words."