Australia should prepare for North Korea attack, former Pentagon official warns

Australia needs to develop better defences in the event of a missile attack from North Korea, a former Pentagon nuclear weapons official has warned.

Brad Roberts, who served as the US deputy assistant secretary of defence for nuclear and missile defence policy, warned the DPRK could strike the country.

“Unfortunately, Australia doesn't really get to choose whether or not North Korea threatens it – it's the choice that the North Korean leader [Kim Jong-un] makes,” he told ABC.

“His objective is to make us fearful so that our leaders will not stand up to his threats and coercion.”

Mr Roberts, a former Obama administration defence official, said there were few “very experience interceptors and radars” in Australia, adding the country should ensure warships are equipped with advanced defences.

The news comes as a British defence think tank warned tensions between the United States and North Korea are so high that war is a “real possibility” and that peaceful talks may no longer be viable.

In a report on Thursday, the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) said Britain must prepare for such a conflict, which would result in “hundreds of thousands” of casualties even if no nuclear weapons were used.

Researchers cited US President Donald Trump’s provoking of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as one of the key factors if a war were to break out.

Earlier this month, Mr Trump called Mr Kim “Rocket Man” in a speech delivered to the United Nations and the North Korean leader responded by calling the President a “mentally deranged US dotard”.

North Korea has made rapid progress in its missile and nuclear programmes this year, launching 15 missiles since February including two over Japan.

In September, Pyongyang claimed it had tested a powerful hydrogen bomb, a device considerably more powerful than an atomic bomb, hours after seismologists detected an earth tremor in North Korea.