British tour operator in North Korea warned to stay away, ‘outbreak of war hours away’

 

March 30, 2013 – NORTH KOREA – The order came after US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Washington would not be cowed by Pyongyang’s bellicose threats and stood ready to respond to “any eventuality.” Mr. Kim directed his rocket units on standby at an overnight emergency meeting with top army commanders, hours after nuclear-capable US B-2 stealth bombers were deployed in ongoing US joint military drills with South Korea. In the event of any “reckless” US provocation, North Korean forces should “mercilessly strike the US mainland … military bases in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in South Korea,” he was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). While North Korea has no proven ability to conduct such strikes, Mr. Kim said: “The time has come to settle accounts with the US imperialists.” Meanwhile, Dylan Harris, director of Lupine Travel, which specializes in holidays to unusual places like Iran, Chernobyl and Siberia, received an email on Friday morning. It said US stealth bomber flights over the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DRPK) had made the situation “critical with the outbreak of war probably only hours away.” It was not clear who the email was from. –Telegraph

War with N. Korea would be ugly in opening hours: Prominent North Korean analysts, citing what they see as increasingly troubling signs coming from the dictatorial regime, have voiced concerns that its new young leader, Kim Jong-un, could do something ill-advised and even start a war with the US. On Friday North Korea renewed what the U.S. has condemned as its ‘bellicose rhetoric’, saying Kim had ordered the nation’s missile forces to prepare to strike the United States and South Korea. According to the Christian Science Monitor, in response to the prospect of North Korea following through on this and other marginally less dire threats, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that the US military “will unequivocally defend, and is unequivocally committed to the alliance with, South Korea.” Some former US Special Operations Forces and longtime Korea defense analysts have their own thoughts on what an ‘unequivocal’ US military response could look like. That includes how US troops would be deployed in the event of a lethal first strike on US and allied military forces by North Korea – precisely the sort of move Kim has been threatening to make. Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said that should Kim choose to do “something even more outlandish,” the US military and South Korean response would be more dire. Retired Brig. General Russell Howard, former commander of the 1st Special Forces Group, which has an Asia focus, said that should Kim decide to begin firing them, he says, “in the first few hours of the conflict, it would be pretty ugly.” At the same time, North Korea could begin “swarming” its sizable contingent of 600,000 Special Operations commandos, Howard added, now the director of the Terrorism, Research, and Education Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the report added. –Zee News