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| Leon Panetta former US SecDef |
By Zachary Keck
North Korea slammed former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s new memoir, and said it is ready for nuclear war.
North Korea slammed former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week, and stated that it remains “fully ready” for nuclear war.
As previously noted, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wrote in his new memoirs that the U.S. planned to use nuclear weapons “if necessary” in the event of a North Korean invasion of South Korea.
“If North Korea moved across the border, our war plans called for the senior American general on the peninsula to take command of all U.S. and South Korean forces and defend South Korea—including by the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary. Our forces maintained a readiness posture that allowed them to ‘fight tonight,’” Panetta wrote in Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace.
On Thursday, North Korean state media released a statement attributed to a spokesperson of the National Peace Committee of Korea, which is a unit of the Korean Workers’ Party [KWP] United Front Department. The United Front Department is responsible for waging psychological warfare against South Korea, and often releases statements on behalf of the DPRK regime.
In the statement, Pyongyang noted that while the U.S. often stages “large-scale nuclear war maneuvers” in South Korea, Panetta’s memoir was the “first time that a U.S. war boss openly declared that it would use nuclear weapons against the DPRK.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat