North Korea Set To Foil Potential US Military Strike Following Trump’s Threat Of ‘Fire And Fury’ 

North Korea is threatening to launch preemptive military strikes against the United States, including targeting the US Pacific island territory of Guam, the latest salvo in an increasingly aggressive back-and-forth between Pyongyang and Washington.

A statement issued by North Korea's state-run media KCNA Wednesday ratcheted up the tension by saying that the nation would "turn the US mainland into the theater of a nuclear war" if it were to uncover any sign of any impending US attack.

Pyongyang's provocation followed the most aggressive language yet from US President Donald Trump on North Korea, who vowed to unleash "fire and fury" if North Korea continued to threaten the United States.

Latest Developments

-- North Korea threatened to strike US military installations on the island of Guam after the US flew B-1B bombers over the Korean Peninsula Tuesday in a show of force.

-- Speaking from his golf resort in New Jersey Tuesday Trump warned North Korea to stop threatening his country or "they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before."

-- President's comments followed claims by US intelligence sources that North Korea has developed the ability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead that can fit atop a missile.

Though the threat from North Korea's nuclear and missile programs has been a top foreign policy priority for Trump since taking office in January, the dangers posed by North Korea have taken center stage since the country test-fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles last month.

Weapons experts say both of those missiles, designed to carry nuclear warheads, could theoretically reach the United States mainland.

The current round of hostile rhetoric comes after the United Nations Security Council voted to impose a new round of sanctions on North Korea in response to the two missile tests, for which Pyongyang said it would "make the US pay dearly."

Tense Times

The Trump administration has vowed to take a multi-pronged approach to rein in North Korea's weapons programs, through the exertion of "peaceful pressure" in the the hope that North Korea returns to the negotiating table once the time is right.

"We're trying to convey to the North Koreans we are not your enemy, we are not your threat, but you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us, and we have to respond," US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last week.

Concerns remain that mixed messaging from the Trump administration, including juxtaposing Tillerson's comments to the President's "fire and fury" ones, could throw a wrench into those plans.

North Korea watchers have long maintained that a war between the US and North Korea is unlikely, largely for two reasons. The first being that both sides recognize how devastating a second Korean War would be, the second being that the Kim regime, which values its survival above all else, knows it would lose.

But experts worry Trump's fiery rhetoric could hurt the US by feeding North Korean insecurities and adding instability to an already tenuous situation.

"We have two inexperienced, impulsive presidents in control of these massive military machines," Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation, told CNN on Monday.

"It's one thing to make a mistake intentionally, its another thing to stumble into a conflict ... either one -- Kim Jong Un or Donald Trump -- could miscalculate and let loose a war unlike anything we have seen since World War II."

A Propaganda Win

Trump's fiery rhetoric also plays into the long-standing North Korean narrative that the nation is under the imminent threat of invasion by the United States.

While nearly all historians say the north invaded the south, North Korea tells it citizens that the Americans actually started the Korean War, which started in 1950 and lasted three years. The regime has spent decades telling its citizens that the United States is preparing for the next one.

That's how Kim Jong Un justifies the economic hardship and isolation that North Korean to his citizens, saying they need to spend money on defense to protect themselves.

Trump's words add fuel to that fire, says Jean Lee, a global fellow for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the former chief of the Seoul and Pyongyang bureaus for The Associated Press.

"This is precisely what the North Koreans want. As twisted as that may seem, I am sure that North Korea is happy about the response from Donald Trump," Lee told CNN.

What Will It Take?

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the country's official name, was estimated to have between 13 and 30 nuclear weapons at the end of 2016, according to the Institute for Science and International Security. But North Korea keeps secret the number of nuclear weapons that it has built, and there is little, if any, reliable public information about it.

A peaceful way to rid the Korean Peninsula of those 13 to 30 nuclear weapons -- and stymie North Korea's future nuclear aspirations -- has long been considered one of the holy grails of Asian diplomacy.

North Korean diplomats have long maintained that their nuclear arsenal is a deterrent, a way to scare the United States into thinking twice about trying to topple the regime if they could be the victim of a nuclear attack in response.

The sticking point is both sides' preconditions.

"We will, under no circumstances, put the nukes and ballistic rockets on negotiating table. Neither shall we flinch even an inch from the road to bolstering up the nuclear forces chosen by ourselves, unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the US against the DPRK are fundamentally eliminated," North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said earlier this week.

The United States, meanwhile, is willing to talk to the North Koreans -- if they commit to denuclearization up-front.

"Their peace and prosperity is best served by being engaged with us and having a denuclearized North Korean peninsula, it's on the assumption that the North Koreans stop their missile tests and stop their nuke tests and stop their development of nuclear weapons," Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan told reporters Tuesday. "We are not going to come to the table until the North Koreans have committed to that."

Who Will Strike First?

Despite bellicose rhetoric coming from US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, analysts say there are no signs the US is planning a first strike on North Korea or that Kim will make good on threats to hit the US territory of Guam.

The US military isn't in any position right now to strike North Korea with the kind of campaign that would be needed to bring battlefield success and would need weeks, if not months, to sort out the logistics, analysts say.

Mark Hertling, a retired US Army general and CNN analyst, said the tens of thousands of US civilians, many of them military dependents, would first need to be evacuated from South Korea.

"How do you get the families off the peninsula? You have to do that first," he said.

The US would also need to add to its forces in the region in what Hertling called "a reinforcement of shooters." These would include US Navy ships and submarines armed with cruise missiles, plus Air Force bombers that could operate out of bases in Japan or Guam, he said.

"Some of these are in places in the region, but not enough to decapitate North Korea in terms of their artillery," Hertling said.

North Korea has thousands of conventional artillery pieces within range of the South Korean capital of Seoul. Studies have estimated South Korean casualties from artillery barrages to be in the tens of thousands on the first day of conflict.

Hertling says a couple of weeks of airstrikes would be needed to take out that artillery. And the US would need the planes, bombs, fuel and support personnel in place to carry out that campaign, he said, comparing it to the country's Desert Storm operation against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991.

In Desert Storm, the US-led coalition began its bombing campaign against Iraq more than five months after hostilities began with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

As with Desert Storm, it would take weeks to get needed US Army tanks and ground troops from the bases in the US to ports in southern South Korea and even longer to get them north to where they'd be in a fight with North Korea, said Hertling, who participated in those kinds of simulations on the Korean Peninsula.

Hertling also said at least two US Navy aircraft carrier strike groups would need to be in the waters near Korea before any US attack.

Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center, said there should be even more US firepower.

"As a planner, I'd rather have three carriers than two," plus additional Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighters, said Schuster, now a Hawaii Pacific University professor.

Schuster also said the US would need to ensure it had enough bombs, missiles and electronic warfare planes to destroy or disable North Korea's air defenses before the heavy bombers needed to strike North Korea's fortified nuclear weapons sites could be sent in. Reinforcements for those aircraft would likely have to be dispatched to Guam or Japan.

Hertling said much of what the US would need may not even be stationed in the US, but deployed in current military campaigns against ISIS in the Middle East or the Taliban in Afghanistan.

All that being said, Schuster said it wouldn't be surprising to see some US assets moving nearer to the Korean Peninsula in the next few days, maybe a carrier group into waters close to Japan, another guided-missile submarine port call in South Korea, or more US Air Force bombers moving to Guam or Okinawa.

But these would be defensive in nature and more of a warning to Pyongyang rather than indications that a US strike was imminent, he said.

As well as that, he said he expects US diplomats to be more visible, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has been visiting countries in Southeast Asia this week.

"This will force Tillerson to be a bit more visible," Schuster said of comments by Trump on Tuesday that North Korea will see the US's "fire and fury."

"He's going to get a lot of questions of what our intentions are," Schuster said.

Schuster also said he doesn't expect any North Korean attack on Guam or any place else, saying Kim Jong Un's threats are mostly bluster.

"Kim's actions are macho within some concise constraints," he said.

One, North Korea's missiles are untested in actual battle and their accuracy is far from certain, he said.

Two, "the US could retaliate in a fashion Kim couldn't withstand," meaning the end of the Kim regime, he said. "He does not want to provoke us into something that would remove him from the scene."

But Kim is a wily operator and knows what he can get away with, so another missile test or large-scale artillery exercises in North Korea wouldn't be surprising, added Schuster.

"Launching a missile at Guam is not something he can get away with. Launching a test missile sends the same message domestically and internationally," said Schuster.

And another missile test is far short of war. As Schuster points out: "There's a big gap between bombast and action."