Tuesday so far:
- North Korea: Keep messing with us and the U.S. “will be catapulted into an unimaginable sea of fire” via our new miniature nuclear warheads.
- Trump: Keep messing with us and you’ll be met with “fire AND fury like the world has never seen.”
- North Korea: Fine, we were thinking we would bomb Guam then. In fact, we’ve got a plan “for making an enveloping fire at the areas around Guam.”
Whoa whoa whoa, guys, Guam? Yes, Guam. That’s the latest on the state of play between the two people who you’d least trust to babysit your kids, yet are somehow in control of all of our destinies—even Guam. The Guam threat came following the above(ish) verbal volleying between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump and marks the latest escalation in a monosyllabic ESL rhetorical dispute that is muddying the waters in what is a real, legitimate dispute over North Korea’s worrying nuclear program.
“North Korea said [-] it is ‘carefully examining’ plans for a missile strike on the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump told the North that any threat to the United States would be met with ‘fire and fury,’” Reuters reports. “The strike plan would be put into practice at any moment once leader Kim Jong-un makes a decision, a spokesman for the Korean People’s Army (KPA) said in a statement carried by the North’s state-run KCNA news agency.”
Guam, of course, is an island U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean some 1,500 miles east of the Philippines and just over 2,000 miles southeast of North Korea. This is not the first time Pyongyang has threatened the territory, which is home to around 150,000 people, but is also the site of Anderson Air Force Base. Guam is sometimes referred to as the “Tip of the Spear” in reference to its importance as U.S. military position for deployment in Asia.
