HR McMaster says the US 'can't tolerate' a nuclear-armed North Korea
- National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned this week that the US cannot co-exist with a nuclear-armed North Korea.
- He said that the US is continuing to pressure "all nations to cut off trade" with North Korea in an effort to pressure it to abandon its nuclear program.
- Ultimately, he argued, the US "can't tolerate" a nuclear-armed North Korea.
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned that the US cannot tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea just hours after the rogue Asian nation declined to engage in diplomatic talks without preconditions with the US.
McMaster added that the US is continuing it's policy of applying military, economic, and diplomatic pressure with the goal of denuclearization.
"What we're doing is really applying maximum pressure to North Korea to really convince Kim Jong Un that this is a dead end," McMaster told CBS on Tuesday morning, adding that this has involved a global effort to isolate North Korea by encouraging "all nations to cut off all trade."
McMaster said that the US, and the global community, "can't tolerate" a nuclear-armed North Korea.
"I don't think we can tolerate that," he said. "The world can't tolerate that risk."
During a Monday PBS interview, McMaster argued that the US must "act urgently" to implement existing sanctions and crack down on trade with the country , adding that the president had ordered him "to continue to refine a military option should we have to use it."
Also on Monday, Trump outlined his national security strategy in a speech that focused largely on economic policy, and argued that the US would confront "economic aggression" from China.
Earlier this month, McMaster called the communist nation "the greatest immediate threat to the United States" and said that the likelihood of war between the US and North Korea is "increasing every day."
"We are in a race to be able to solve this problem," he said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California.
North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement read on state TV that President Donald Trump and his administration were "begging for nuclear war" by engaging in what the statement referred to as an "extremely dangerous nuclear gamble," CNN reported.
This came as the US and South Korea began their largest cooperative aerial drill in history, dubbed Vigilant Ace, on the Korean peninsula.
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Rosie Perper contributed to this report.