As the U.S. deploys a Navy missile destroyer in case of a launch by North Korea, the country's leader Kim Jong Un has abolished an armistice with South Korea and is now saying he will re-open a nuclear bomb facility that was closed in 2007. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
By Andrea Mitchell, Jim Miklaszewski and Ian Johnston, NBC News
The U.S. Navy has deployed a second destroyer in the western Pacific to respond to any missile threats from North Korea as tensions continue to flare.
The USS Decatur was headed back to San Diego, Calif., when it was given a new mission: to join the USS McCain in a missile defense mission, Pentagon spokesman George Little said Tuesday.
A third destroyer, the USS Fitzgerald, is also available to respond, if necessary, officials said.
NBC's Jim Maceda reports on U.S. Navy movements of destroyers into the Pacific amid threats from North Korea.
The warship movement came amid new nuclear threats from North Korea and a call for peace talks from United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon, who said the crisis ?has already gone too far.?
?Nuclear threats are not a game. Aggressive rhetoric and military posturing only result in counter-actions, and fuel fear and instability," Ban said at a news conference in Andorra, where he was on an official visit.
Ban offered to facilitate peace talks, but how the North would react was not immediately clear. Ban was South Korea's foreign affairs minister before election to his UN post.
The rogue communist state continued to make threats Tuesday, and said it would rebuild and restart nuclear facilities, including a mothballed reactor that can make one bomb's worth of plutonium a year.
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the amount of hostility emanating from Pyongyang was alarming.
The U.S., Japan and South Korea had to be ?very firm in sending them a message that we are going to do everything necessary to defend our security and defend our troops,? Panetta?told CNBC in an interview. He said there was a danger of a "miscalculation" that escalated.
?I think we've got to be very concerned about ... the level of provocation that North Korea is engaged in. They are in the process of testing ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]. They've also been testing nuclear weapons,? he said.
?The kind of provocation and bellicosity they're showing now with their rhetoric raises a lot of concern,? he added. ?It just means the United States and our allies Japan and South Korea have to be very firm in sending them a message that we are going to do everything necessary to defend our security and defend our troops.?
A spokesman for the North's General Department of Atomic Energy said restarting its nuclear facilities was part of efforts to resolve the country's acute electricity shortage, but also for "bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity," the official Korean Central News Agency said, according to Reuters.
Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test in February, prompting a new round of U.N. sanctions that have infuriated its leaders and led to a torrent of threatening rhetoric. The United States has sent nuclear-capable bombers and stealth jets to participate in annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that the allies call routine but that Pyongyang claims are invasion preparations.
Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon expresses great concern over the ongoing nuclear threats being issued by the North Korean government.
KCNA kept up the rhetoric on?its English-language site Tuesday, with an article headlined ?Intensified Anti-U.S. Action Called For.?
It quoted the ?North Side Committee for Implementing the June 15 Joint Declaration? as saying in a statement that the joint U.S. and South Korean military exercise ?clearly proves that the U.S. imperialists' scenario to launch a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula at any cost has reached an extremely reckless phase of its implementation.?
?As already clarified by the DPRK [North Korea], gone are the days when it could have verbal exchange with them,? the statement said.
?To wage a merciless, just, retaliatory war is the only way of rooting out the source of the danger of a nuclear war on this land and build a peaceful and prosperous reunified thriving nation where all Koreans live together,? it added.
Reuters and NBC News' John Newland contributed to this report.
Related:
US Navy shifts destroyer in wake of North Korea missile threats
US official warns North Korea is no 'paper tiger'
Analyst: Threats are predictable, Kim Jong Un is not
This story was originally published on Tue Apr 2, 2013 4:39 AM EDT
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