SOMERSET, N.J. -- President Donald Trump on Sunday mocked the leader of nuclear-armed North Korea as "Rocket Man" while administration officials expressed differing views about how to handle Pyongyang's weapons programs and bellicose threats.
The secretary of state held out hope the North would return to the bargaining table, though the president's envoy to the United Nations said the Security Council has "pretty much exhausted" all its options.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pledged to continue the weapons programs, saying his country is nearing its goal of "equilibrium" in military force with the United States.
North Korea will be high on the agenda for world leaders this week at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, Trump's biggest moment on the world stage since his inauguration in January.
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Trump is scheduled to address the world body, which he has criticized as weak and incompetent, on Tuesday.
Trump, who spent the weekend at his New Jersey golf club, said in a Twitter post Sunday that he had spoken with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Saturday night and "Asked him how Rocket Man is doing. Long gas lines forming in North Korea. Too bad!" The "gas lines" were a reference to U.N. sanctions against the North.
Trump is scheduled to join Moon and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a working lunch Thursday in New York to discuss North Korea on the sidelines of the U.N. meetings, White House aides said. But Trump will not have the opportunity to meet with Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, both of whom are skipping the gathering.
Asked about Trump's description of Kim, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said "Rocket Man" was "a new one and I think maybe for the president." But, he said, "that's where the rockets are coming from. Rockets, though, we ought to probably not laugh too much about because they do represent a great threat to all."
On ABC's This Week, McMaster said Kim is "going to have to give up his nuclear weapons because the president has said he's not going to tolerate this regime threatening the United States and our citizens with a nuclear weapon."
Asked whether that meant Trump would launch a military strike, McMaster said, "he's been very clear about that, that all options are on the table."
McMaster said Washington isn't assuming the sanctions will work or buy time.
"We all have our doubts about whether or not that's going to be enough, and so we have to prepare all options. We have to make sure all options are under development to ensure that this regime cannot threaten the world with a nuclear weapon," he said.
Some doubt that Kim would ever agree to surrender his arsenal.
Asked on CNN whether the Trump administration should continue to deny the North diplomatic talks until it ends its nuclear program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said no.
"I think that North Korea is not going to give up its program with nothing on the table," she said Sunday. "I think that what could happen is that we could have reliable verification of a freeze of both the nuclear program and the missile arsenal, and that we could conceivably talk China into supporting that kind of a freeze, because it would carry with it no regime change and no war."
Feinstein also said U.S. missile defense "isn't perfect" and that she's "concerned about the safety of the United States."
Kim has threatened Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, and has fired missiles over Japan, a U.S. ally. North Korea also recently tested what it said was a hydrogen bomb.
'PRESSURE CAMPAIGN'
The U.N. Security Council twice in recent weeks has voted unanimously to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea, including targeting shipments of oil and other fuel used in missile testing. Trump's U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union that North Korea was starting to "feel the pinch" from the additional sanctions of more than $1 billion.
"We have economically strangled North Korea at this point, and they have said as much," she said.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation that he was waiting for the North to express interest in "constructive, productive talks."
"We have tried a couple of times to signal to them that we're ready when they're ready," Tillerson said, "and they responded with more missile launches and a nuclear test. All they need to do to let us know they're ready to talk is to just stop these tests, stop these provocative actions, and let's lower the threat level and the rhetoric."
Tillerson said the U.S. strategy is to pursue a "peaceful pressure campaign" based on what he called the four "nos": not seeking either regime change or collapse in North Korea, an accelerated reunification of the Korean Peninsula, or a reason to send in military forces.
But Haley warned of a tougher U.S. response to future North Korean provocations, and she said she would be happy to turn the matter over to Defense Secretary James Mattis "because he has plenty of military options."
Mattis said after Kim tested a hydrogen bomb earlier this month that the U.S. would answer any threat from the North with a "massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming."
Trump has threatened to rain "fire and fury" on North Korea if the North continued with its threats. Haley said that wasn't an empty threat from the president, but she declined to describe the Trump's intentions.
"If North Korea keeps on with this reckless behavior, if the United States has to defend itself or defend its allies in any way, North Korea will be destroyed and we all know that and none of us want that," Haley said. "None of us want war. But we also have to look at the fact that you are dealing with someone who is being reckless, irresponsible and is continuing to give threats not only to the United States, but to all their allies, so something is going to have to be done."
CUTTING OFF FUEL
The United States has pushed to cut off oil and gas to the North, but it settled last week for modest cutbacks under a U.N. resolution.
But U.S. intelligence agencies are focused on a less ordinary fuel. They believe a rare, potent rocket fuel that powers North Korea's weapons arrived in the country from China and Russia.
The U.S. government is trying to determine whether those two countries are still providing the ingredients for the highly volatile fuel and, if so, whether North Korea's supply can be interrupted. Among those who study the issue, there is a growing belief that the United States should focus on the fuel, either to halt it, if possible, or to take advantage of its volatile properties to slow the North's program.
But it may well be too late. Intelligence officials believe that the North's program has advanced to the point where it is no longer as reliant on outside suppliers and that it may itself be making the fuel, known as UDMH, which is short for unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine.
Despite a long record of intelligence warnings that the North was acquiring both forceful missile engines and the fuel to power them, there is no evidence that Washington has ever moved with urgency to cut off Pyongyang's access to the rare propellant.
Classified memos from both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations laid out how the North's pursuit of the highly potent fuel would enable it to develop missiles that could strike almost anywhere in the continental United States.
Some experts are skeptical that the North has succeeded in domestic production, given the great difficulty of making and using the highly poisonous fuel, which in far more technically advanced nations has led to giant explosions of missiles and factories.
But inside the intelligence agencies and among a few on Capitol Hill who have studied the matter, the fuel is a source of fascination and is seen as a natural target for the U.S. effort to halt Kim's missile program.
"If North Korea does not have UDMH, it cannot threaten the United States, it's as simple as that," said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "These are the issues that the U.S. intelligence community has to answer: from which countries they receive the fuel -- it's probably China -- and whether North Korea has a stockpile and how big it is."
Today, the chemical is made primarily by China, a few European nations and Russia, which calls it the devil's venom. Russia only recently resumed production of the fuel, after Western supplies were cut off over Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Information for this article was contributed by Darlene Superville and Jessica Gresko of The Associated Press; by David Nakamura, Anne Gearan and Carol Morello of The Washington Post; by Arit John, Mark Niquette, Susan Decker and Ben Brody of Bloomberg News; and by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger of The New York Times.
A Section on 09/18/2017