Trump's stern warning to North Korea
President Trump on Thursday may have said, "I have pretty severe things that we're thinking about" with regards to North Korea's launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but military options are probably at the bottom of the list because of the reality that any military action could trigger an all-out war with North Korea.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis emphasized to reporters Thursday that the administration is focused on diplomatic and economic sanctions efforts to deal with North Korea's ICBM launch.
Mattis also discounted the possibility that North Korea's new missile capability Brings us closer to war".
And while diplomatic efforts to rein North Korea's missile program have so far proved unsuccessful, Mattis stressed that "diplomacy has not failed. As Churchill put it, it's better to jaw-jaw than war- war.”
Below, ABC News takes a look at the limited military options the Trump administration might consider for North Korea in the future.
Pre-emptive Strike
North Korea's stated goal is to develop an ICBM capable of delivering a nuclear warhead towards the United States. North Korea's July 4 ICBM launch demonstrated it is making progress towards that goal since they can now reach Alaska. But it does not appear that North Korea has a miniaturized nuclear weapon small enough to place atop that ICBM or for that matter, aim it accurately at a target.
But what if in the future North Korea develops that capability?
The most likely option at that point would be a pre-emptive strike targeting North Korean missiles and nuclear facilities.
But a pre-emptive strike could immediately trigger a massive North Korean military response towards South Korea and possibly result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. North Korea could also target American military bases in South Korea and Japan with its missile systems.
The vast majority of North Korea's million-man army is stationed just north of the demilitarized zone that separates it from South Korea.
North Korean artillery is also capable of reaching Seoul 30 miles south of the DMZ, which means civilians could be the victims of indiscriminate artillery fire.
In order to deter a potential North Korean military response, any initial preemptive military action would likely have to be massive in scope.
What would be targeted?
North Korea's nuclear facility at Yongbyon is well known, but striking it could cause an environmental disaster. It is also possible that North Korea may have secret nuclear facilities where it is working on miniaturizing a nuclear warhead small enough to be placed atop an ICBM.
The Sanum-dong missile production facility in Pyongyang could also be an easy target, though it is appears that North Korea has built additional missile factories that could also be targeted.
North Korea has two long-range missile facilities, the Sohae Satellite Launching Station on the country's northwest coast and the Tonghae Satellite Launching Ground in the northeast.
But targeting missile launch sites has become harder as North Korea has consistently shown that it can launch its long range missiles on short notice from mobile launchers.
Over the past five months North Korea has used mobile launchers to fire a solid-fueled rocket, a single-stage intermediate range missile and a two-stage ICBM proving it no longer needs permanent launch facilities to test its new rockets.
These missiles were all launched on short notice from locations that had never been used before for missile launches. For example, Tuesday's ICBM launch took place on the grounds of an aircraft factory outside of Kusong.
That could mean detecting a nuclear-armed ICBM in the future could present a challenge to U.S. intelligence.
A U.S. official said that in advance of Tuesday's ICBM launch, U.S. satellites had picked up potential launch activity at the Kusong site, but determined it was likely a KN-17 intermediate range missile previously tested by North Korea.
It turned out to be a KN-17-like missile with a second stage attached, the 30 second burn executed by the second stage is what enabled the missile to go beyond the minimum 3,400 mile distance needed to qualify as an ICBM.
Other Military Options
Other U.S. military options are even more limited because they too could trigger a massive military response from North Korea.
For example, the U.S. could shoot down a North Korean missile while in flight, says David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security.
The extreme option of a naval blockade to enforce potential economic sanctions would likely have little effect says Albright since most of its goods come through land routes via China and Russia.
Either of those options also carries the possibility that North Korea would respond with a massive conventional attack against South Korea.
Albright speculated the U.S. could launch a cyberattack against North Korea's missile systems, but does not think it make much of an impact given how basic their launch technology seems. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that North Korea's series of disastrous launch failures last year may have been the result of a secret U.S. sabotage effort targeting North Korea's missile launch systems.
Both Russia and the United States declared Friday’s first meeting between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin a success. But hours after the two sat down at the G20 Summit in Germany, the White House has found itself fending off criticism Trump had been too soft on Putin, as the Kremlin seemed to outflank his administration in shaping how the encounter is being presented.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was in the room with the two presidents, said that Trump had “pressed” Putin on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Almost simultaneously, however, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who had also been present at the talks, told a separate news conference that Trump had informed Putin he “accepts” Russia’s denials that it was behind the election meddling.
“The president said that he had heard the clear statements of President Putin that it isn’t true, and that the Russian leadership had not interfered in these elections, and he said that he accepts these statements. And that’s it really,” Lavrov said.
That appears to be at odds with Tillerson’s account, but the U.S. secretary of state also suggested that Trump had indicated to Putin that he wished to move on from the accusations of interference, which he said had become a hindrance to better relations.
"The two presidents I think rightly focused on is, ‘how do we move forward?’ Because it's not clear to me that we will ever come to some agreed upon resolution of that question between the two nations," Tillerson said.
“There was not a lot re-litigating history,” he said.
Trump 'pressed' Putin on election meddling but he denied it, Rex Tillerson says
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Tillerson added that the over two-hour conversation had revealed “very clear positive chemistry” between the presidents. “Neither one of them wanted to stop,” he said.
Taken together, however, Lavrov and Tillerson’s comments have prompted an outcry from some that Trump had effectively signaled to Putin he was dropping the issue, despite assessments from U.S. intelligence that Moscow had unleashed an unprecedented operation against the election involving cyberattacks and propaganda which many officials suggest could be repeated.
“For Secretary Tillerson to say that this issue will remain unresolved is disgraceful,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
“Working to compromise the integrity of our election process cannot and should not be an area where ‘agree to disagree’ is an acceptable conclusion. Congress and Americans of all political persuasions and parties should do all they can to increase sanctions on Russia and prevent the reduction of any sanctions by the executive branch,” he added.
Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow under the Obama administration, wrote in a tweet that: “Agreeing to disagree on the FACTS of Russian violation of our sovereignty is weak.”
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, however, was less phased by the comments, saying he wasn’t surprised Putin had denied Russia had interfered in the election.
“It comes as no surprise to me Vladimir Putin would deny what we know they did,” Ryan told the Associated Press.
The controversy recalled Trump’s last encounter with top Russian officials. During his May meeting in the Oval Office with Lavrov and Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, Trump later was alleged to have accidentally revealed classified information to Lavrov. This saw the White House caught flat-footed by the Russians, who released photos showing the president guffawing with his guests hours before the U.S. side managed to get its own photo out.
The White House said it had been “tricked” by the Russians into allowing in a Russian wire-agency photographer while barring American outlets from being present.
Today, the Russians seemed to move similarly quickly to set out their account of the event.
Putin himself gave the first remarks on the meeting, telling reporters in a news conference with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that he and Trump had discussed major issues, including Syria and cybersecurity.
Lavrov spoke shortly after on-camera to reporters, where he suggested Trump had indicated his scepticism about allegations in the U.S. about Russia’s interference.
“President Trump, I’m sure either he himself or Rex Tillerson will talk about this, said that this campaign is already acquiring quite a strange character because for many months when accusations have been voiced, not a single fact has come out," Lavrov said.
By contrast, Tillerson, who began his news conference after Lavrov, imposed a no-camera rule on his briefing and a temporary embargo publishing the audio. White House officials, asked about Lavrov’s claim that Trump “accepted” Putin’s denials of election meddling, declined to answer for hours afterwards, despite the discrepancy.
Ahead of the meeting, many analysts had suggested the Kremlin’s primary goal from the meeting had been to be able to present the encounter as friendly. At the event, the two sides also agreed to another Russian goal -- a joint ceasefire in southwestern Syria, to be enforced by Russian military police with U.S. endorsement.
In Moscow, senior foreign policy officials lined up to hail the meeting as a success, saying it had halted the slide in U.S.-Russian relations and perhaps heralded a turn towards friendship.
“The results of the meeting of the presidents of Russia and the U.S., I confess, surpassed all of my, and I’m sure, not only my, expectations,” said Konstantin Kosachev, head of Russia’s senate committee on international affairs, speaking with the news agency Interfax.
“On many concrete issues, Russia and the U.S. are starting either to collaborate in practice or to discuss the most important questions that define the character of bilateral relations. In some sense that’s a breakthrough,” Kosachev said.
Another politician, Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the parliamentary committee on international affairs, cheered that the meeting “could mark the start of a process of halting the degradation in Russian-American relations.”
Aleksander Baunov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center and former Russian diplomat, said that given the low expectations, things had gone well for Putin.
"Diplomatically it’s ok,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s at least more than the expectations we had before.”
Despite the differing accounts of Friday's meeting, on Saturday morning Trump told reporters, "Rex and I had a tremendous meeting yesterday with Putin."
