WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Any new military conflict with North Korea would likely escalate quickly to the use of nuclear weapons, bringing catastrophic casualties not seen since World War Two and an untold economic impact worldwide, former U.S. defence officials and experts say.
While the United States has maintained an uneasy calm with North Korea for more than six decades and spikes in tensions are not new, recent supercharged rhetoric between the unpredictable U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have heightened the risk of miscalculation that could make that nightmare a reality, they say.
On Thursday, North Korea upped the ante by saying it would complete plans by mid-August to fire four intermediate-range missiles over Japan to land near the U.S. Pacific island territory of Guam, after Trump said that any threats by Pyongyang would be "met with fire and fury like the world has never seen."
The exchange followed a United Nations resolution tightening sanctions on North Korea after it tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads to the United States.
Trump said on Thursday his fire and fury comment was not tough enough.
Despite the war of words, for now the U.S. military says there has been no change in its readiness posture in South Korea or elsewhere in Asia. Analysts say they have seen no evidence of any increased alert in North Korea.
But they warned the bluster could raise the risk of miscalculation that could result in conflict far beyond the scale of the 1950-53 Korean War, which claimed the lives of more than 50,000 Americans and millions of Koreans and ended in an armed truce, not a peace treaty.
"The major thing people are talking about is miscalculation - we could easily stumble into something with the rhetoric being so heated," said Philip Yun, a Korea expert who was an Asia adviser under former President Bill Clinton.
Yun, now executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, an anti-proliferation initiative, said the risks were exacerbated by the "credibility problem" Trump has acquired due to his frequent off-the-cuff remarks that often appear to go counter to the more measured remarks of his officials.
"In nuclear deterrence, credibility is everything and there's a situation that if no-one takes you seriously, you have to do something to make sure you are taken seriously, and that's where the miscalculation can happen," Yun said.
With hundreds of thousands of troops and huge arsenals arrayed on both sides of a tense demilitarized zone, the Korean peninsula has long been a tinder box.
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