Terrorism and North Korea are most immediate threats to the US in a long term, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said.
"North Korea is relatively low-probability, but massive liability risk. The terrorist threat today is non-nuclear. But different and in greater magnitude and in more places around the world. So they're very different threats and our response has to be different. But each of them is on top of us today. So near term I'd place those two at the top," Pompeo said in a interview with Washington Free Beacon.
According to him, the recent US policy is based on new intelligence, which indicates North Korea could have a deliverable nuclear warhead on a long-range missile by the end of the decade.
"That's really the risk. It might be that they launch one, put a nuclear warhead [on it] and get lucky. That's bad. We need to prevent that. But the real threat is can they do it in a way that's reliable such that they have confidence in their deterrent capability," he added.
CIA Director added that the US President has made "very, very clear he's not going to permit that to happen"
He stressed that they created a mission center designed to address the threat from the North Korean government. "We are preparing to make sure that when the president comes to us and says "We think we've hit the point where diplomacy no longer works" that we're prepared to deliver him a set of options that might well succeed in achieving whatever the policy objective is," Pompeo concluded.
