Washington • Most Utahns are concerned that North Korea poses a real threat to the United States, a new poll shows as the so-called hermit kingdom is testing missiles that could deliver a nuclear warhead as far as Salt Lake City or beyond.
Nearly nine in 10 registered Utah voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about North Korea’s nuclear program being a threat to the United States, according to a poll by The Salt Lake Tribune and the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics.
Only one in 10 said they weren’t concerned.
A similar fraction — 12 percent — advocated using military force to quash any further development of nuclear capability by North Korea.
A big majority of Utah voters support either continuing the current U.S. policy of sanctions and embargos (36 percent) or directly negotiating a compromise (33 percent). About 8 percent of those surveyed said the United States should lean on China to address North Korea while 2 percent said it wasn’t America’s problem to deal with.
Pyongyang’s recent missile tests have worried experts that the country may now be capable of firing a nuclear bomb as far as Denver and possible even Chicago or New York City or Boston.
North Korea’s last missile flew for 45 minutes and some 2,300 miles into space. With a different trajectory it could be capable of striking the West Coast or deeper into the United States.
President Donald Trump has vowed to keep North Korea from taking any action: “We’ll be able to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything.”
But the increased tests by North Korea have the Pentagon concerned.
“North Korea is extremely dangerous and more dangerous as the weeks go by,” Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, told the National Press Club last week.
Utahns agree.
Some 49 percent of registered voters surveyed said they were “very concerned” by North Korea’s potential threat and 38 percent were “somewhat concerned.” Republicans and Democrats alike shared that concern about equally.
More older Utahns said they were concerned than younger voters.
Experts say Americans should be concerned about the potential for North Korea – which gained the knowledge to create nuclear bombs in 2006 – to build ballistic missiles that could threaten the United States.
“I’ve referred to the North Korean nuclear challenge as a slow motion Cuban missile crisis,” says Robert S. Litwak, director of International Security Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. Unlike JFK‘s response during those famous 13 days in October 1962, he added, ”this one will play out over the next two to three years.”
Litwak says that if North Korea is able to minimize nuclear warheads and master the “tricky” re-entry phase of a ballistic missile, they would within years “be able to directly threaten the U.S. homeland with a nuclear strike and would thereby join Russia and China as a third adversarial state with the capability of directly targeting the United States.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said this week that the Trump administration will seek a diplomatic solution to the threat North Korea poses, noting that the United States does not “seek regime change” there.
“We do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula. We do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel,” Tillerson said during a State Department briefing Tuesday. “We are not your enemy, we are not your threat, but you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us and we have to respond.”
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