Crisis on Korean peninsula can spark global thermonuclear war

An American journalist says the extreme rhetoric and tit-for-tat response between the two Koreas could rapidly ignite not only a military confrontation in the Korean Peninsula but also a global thermonuclear war.

The comment comes as the United States is shifting a guided-missile destroyer in the Pacific to waters off the Korean Peninsula as tensions mount with North Korea, a US military official say.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Monday that the US Navy has sent the USS Fitzgerald to the southwestern coast of the Korean Peninsula to defend against a possible North Korean rocket launch, AFP reported.

The shifting of the USS Fitzgerald was “a prudent move” meant to offer “greater missile defense options should that become necessary,” the unnamed official added.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Mike Billington, Asia editor for the Executive Intelligence Review weekly magazine to further discuss the issue. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Many thanks for joining us here on Press TV. It is interesting to know that White House spokesman Jay Carney has said that there has been no sign that Pyongyang is mobilizing its forces following last week’s threats despite that the US is now deploying USS Fitzgerald off the Korean peninsula. What do you make of that?

Billington: Well, I make that we’re in a global situation which is very very close to war. War between the United States and Russia and the United States and China due to the insistence of the US that it have the right to regime change anywhere it wishes as in the Middle East, as in Libya and Iraq and now Syria and Iran on the target list.

And that the attempt to respond to what are relatively normal North Korean extreme rhetoric after being given sanctions or after seeing these deployments, military exercises in the south is a tit-for-tat response in which it could even though there is no particular intention on either side in the local context to provoke a war, the global context means that a spark that could go off there could very rapidly become not only a war in the Korean Peninsula but a war on a global scale.

A global thermonuclear war which has to be seen in the context of the greatest global financial collapse now spreading across Europe and the United States which is what’s driving this push for war.

Press TV: Right but Mr. Billington do you think the US has calculated in these threats the threat of a global spark or whatever you may call it which could dangerously escalate the situation into a full-scale war which as you’ve just pointed out no side really wants?

Billington: Exactly, no side could win either. The Obama administration is functioning as an asset of the city of London and Wall Street who are desperate; they’re panicked; the Cyprus situation, the insane decision to begin seizing people’s private accounts in the banking system shows the level of panic in the Western financial oligarchy, the financial institutions.