US repeatedly considers nuclear attack on N. Korea

From the 1950s Pentagon to today's Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War. Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea's capital during the war. The U.S. military services later vied for the lead role in any "atomic delivery" over North Korea. In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed U.S. warplanes stood by in South Korea on 15-minute alert to strike the north. Just this past April, issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "all options are on the table" for dealing with Pyongyang–meaning U.S. nuclear strikes were not ruled out. The stream of new revelations about U.S. nuclear planning further fills in a picture of what North Korea calls "the increasing nuclear threat of the U.S.," which it cites as the reason it developed its own atom-bomb program–as a deterrent. "This is the lesson we have drawn," North Korea's vice foreign minister, Pak Kil Yon, told the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 29. The new information is contained in Korean War documents released by the CIA to mark this June's anniversary of the start of the conflict; another declassified package obtained by Washington's private National Security Archive research group under the Freedom of Information Act; and additional documents, also once top-secret and found at the U.S. National Archives, provided by intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid.