There will be dire consequences for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's regime if any nuclear weapons are used against the United States or its allies, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon's press secretary, warned this week.
"I think we've been very clear that were North Korea to employ a nuclear weapon, it would be the end of the North Korean regime," Ryder said during Tuesday's press briefing, in response to a question about the United States' readiness to respond to an attack.
He stressed that the focus of the United States, however, "continues to be on working very closely with our allies and our partners in the region to deter aggression, to preserve security and stability in the region."
His comments come after Pyongyang enacted a new law, saying that it will allow the preemptive use of nuclear weapons.
They repeated the Defense Department's National Defense Strategy in October, which stated that "any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime," reports South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.
Earlier this year, Kim called for "exponential" growth of his country's nuclear arsenal, and both Washington, D.C., and Seoul have reported that North Korea could conduct nuclear testing at "any time."
North Korea conducted its last nuclear test, its sixth such exercise, in September 2017. According to a study from the University of California, Santa Cruz, that bomb was estimated to have been equivalent to about 250 kilotons of TNT and created an explosion that was 16 times the size of the bomb the United States detonated in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan.
The USC seismologists, in findings published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, said the test was also larger than the previous five underground tests at North Korea's Punggye-ri test site.
"From 2006 to 2016 North Korea steadily increased the size of the events, from somewhere around 1 kiloton up to around 20 kilotons," coauthor Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz wrote in the report, published in 2019. "The very early events looked like they didn't work very well, because they were unusually small. And then in one year, they jumped up to 250-ish kilotons. The scary thing is that this was such a big device."
The study noted that the North Koreans have been conducting underground nuclear device tests since 2006. The test in 2017 created a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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