Leon Panetta’s memoirs tells of willingness to use nukes in Korea

Posted on : 2014-10-09 13:52 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Former US Secretary of Defense describes North Korea as one of a few potential attackers on the US mainland

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

As US Secretary of Defense in Oct. 2011, Leon Panetta told high-level South Korean officials the US was willing to use nuclear weapons if necessary to defend South Korea in an emergency on the Korean Peninsula.

Panetta recounts the experience in his memoirs “Worthy Fights,” published on Oct. 7. After mentioning discussions with then South Korean Minister of National Defense Kim Kwan-jin and other senior officials during the Oct. 2011 visit to South Korea, Panetta also writes that the two sides reaffirmed their longstanding ROK-US Mutual Defense Agreement, including the US’s pledge to defend South Korea with nuclear weapons if necessary in the event of a North Korean attack.

Panetta also describes the emergency plan for a North Korean invasion reported to him by then-USFK commander Walter “Skip” Sharp during his visit a year before as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director.

“If North Korea moved across the border, our war plans called for the senior American general on the peninsula to take command of all U.S. and South Korean forces and defend South Korea - including by the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary,” he writes.

Mentioning possible enemy threats, including a potential missile attack on the mainland US, Panetta writes that “Russia, China, and North Korea were all potential attackers in these scenarios, but North Korea was by far the most worrisome.”

“The North Koreans had not yet mated a nuclear warhead to the ICBMs they were developing - as far as we knew - but the prospect of an intercontinental missile streaking toward an American city and exploding its warhead, even a conventional warhead, was awful to contemplate,” he continues.

Panetta also comments in the book on Beijing’s lack of pull with Pyongyang.

“Even China’s reach was limited,” he writes.

“First as CIA director and later as secretary of defense, I would persistently push the Chinese to rein in their North Korean allies, or at least to give us assurances that they would intervene if the regime suddenly collapsed, as it realistically could. Still, the regime remained infuriatingly hard to penetrate,” the memoirs note.

Recalling an Oct. 2011 visit to greet Xi Jinping, Panetta notes that the Chinese President expressed relief when Panetta said North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were destabilizing regional allies and threatening the US, and acknowledged that Pyongyang had become a nuisance for Beijing as well.

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