NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel indicated a U.S. pre-emptive strike against North Korea is coming.
His comments came during a report from Seoul, South Korea on MSNBC on Tuesday night.
"So, there is a danger," Engel said. "It seems that at this stage, North Korea has a hydrogen bomb."
And he noted, it also has long-range missile capability.
"So, when you combine these two things together, they do have, it seems to be, a nuclear weapons capacity that could threaten U.S. territory, if not the United States mainland," he said. "But it is still a fairly crude system. It is still one that is in limited numbers. And still one that the U.S. feels that it could potentially deal with through missile defense or through a first strike scenario.".
He said officials have told him the U.S. still has a window to set the North Korean nuclear program back several years.
"But that would mean a military strike," he said. "It would have enormous cost and enormous cost especially for the city where I am right now because should the United States attack to protect American security, this city would pay a price with a likely onslaught from artillery and rockets and potentially face World War II level damage. So, it is a very tense situation where there's a window and that window is closing and getting narrower with passing time. "
Asked if North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, would stand by and not attack South Korea with his conventional forces, Engel replied:
"It's possible," he said. "And I think that is the calculation, or these are the kind of calculations that war planners are going through in the (National Security Council) right now that if the U.S. took some sort of action against the nuclear facilities, hit the test site in the mountains and then followed it up immediately with a threat saying: 'We hit these sites. We are not going to go any further.' But If you unleash those missiles on Seoul, and those rockets that are pointing at this city with a flight time that is very short, the U.S. will follow one with a devastating attack. Would North Korea hesitate? Would they take that attack on the chin knowing that the regime was at stake? That's an unknown."
Engel noted the U.S. is still pushing for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
"But if this diplomacy doesn't work, there might have to be a military strike from the U.S. perspective before the window closes and North Korea has many intercontinental ballistic missiles hidden in hardened bunkers with nuclear weapons attached to them and it is truly an irreversible situation," he said.
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