Michele Flournoy: ‘There Are No Easy or Good Options’ on North Korea

EXCERPT:

FLOURNOY: "I also think we need to look at other coercive measures, both sanctions and potential military options. But we should be pretty sober in doing so. When you look at the military options, one of the challenges is we don’t have perfect intelligence about where the nuclear weapons are and even where the missiles are. And so it’s not clear that we could actually destroy the capability in its entirety in a preemptive strike. The other challenge is that a preemptive strike would be very high risk of provoking a North Korean response. Shelling of Seoul, rocketing of Seoul, putting 25 million South Korean civilians and U.S. Forces on the peninsula at risk. So there are no easy or good options here and we need to be cognizant of that as we — in terms of how the president — the kind of rhetoric he uses in this situation."