United States Defense Secretary Ash Carter said if North Korea test fires an intercontinental ballistic missile that doesn’t directly threaten the U.S. or its allies in the region, the Pentagon may decide not to shoot it down.
At his final Pentagon news conference, Carter said there might be more value to the United States to allow the test to take place, in order to gather intelligence about the progress North Korea has made in developing an ICBM that could reach the mainland United States with a nuclear warhead.
“If the missile is threatening, it will be intercepted,” Carter said. “If it’s not threatening we will not necessarily do so, because it may be more to our advantage to first of all save our interceptor inventory, and second to gather intelligence from the flight.”
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post Sunday, Carter’s mentor, former Defense Secretary William Perry, argued that a shoot-down of North Korea’s missile, if diplomacy fails to deter the nuclear ambitions of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, would send a strong signal of resolve.
“We could also pursue non-diplomatic approaches,” Perry argued, “such as disrupting their ICBM tests, not at their launch sites but over international waters.”
“Indeed, our diplomacy would have a better chance of working if the North Korean government realized that we were serious about non-diplomatic alternatives,” Perry wrote.
