Trump: North Korea’s missiles will get better

Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea

President Donald Trump said after North Korea’s latest failed rocket launch that communist leader Kim Jong-Un eventually will develop better missiles, and “we can’t allow it to happen.”

In a taped interview broadcast Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the president would not discuss the possibility of military action, saying: “It is a chess game. I just don’t want people to know what my thinking is.”

Separately, Trump’s national security adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said North Korea’s most recent missile test represents “open defiance of the international community.” He said North Korea poses “a grave threat,” not just to the U.S. and its Asian allies, but also to China.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” McMaster said it is important “for all of us to confront this regime, this regime that is pursuing the weaponization of a missile with a nuclear weapon.”

“This is something that we know we cannot tolerate,” McMaster said.

On Saturday, a North Korean midrange ballistic missile broke up a few minutes after launch, the third test-fire flop this month. The program’s repeated failures over the past few years have given rise to suspicions of U.S. sabotage.

Australia’s prime minister used a commemoration of a World War II naval battle today to warn that his country and the United States would not tolerate North Korea’s “reckless, dangerous threats” to regional peace.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke at a dawn service in the northeastern city of Townsville where Australians and Americans gathered to remember the pivotal Battle of Coral Sea, which was fought from May 4-8, 1942, in waters about 500 miles away.