Former U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster has said that the United States accepting North Korea as a de facto nuclear power would prompt Japan to debate whether or not it needed its own nuclear weapons, a claim that comes amid rekindled tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
McMaster, in an interview published earlier this month with the Asahi Shimbun daily, was answering a question about the possibility of military conflict on the peninsula in 2017, when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un unleashed a spate of missile launches and conducted its most powerful nuclear test to date. U.S. President Donald Trump responded with vitriol, vowing to rain "fire and fury" on the North if Kim threatened the United States.
Asked about the possibility of war, the retired lieutenant general said: "I do think that we were on a path that, if we were unable to alter it, that it was on a path to conflict."