N Korean nukes ‘existential threat’ to US: intel chief

WASHINGTON: North Korea’s nuclear program poses a potential “existential threat” to the United States, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said Tuesday.

“The decision time is becoming ever closer in terms of how we respond to this,” Coats said in remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee.“Our goal is a peaceful settlement,” he added. “We’re using maximum pressure on North Korea in various ways.”

Asked about Pyongyang’s nuclear program, Coats said “this is an existential threat, potentially to the United States, but also to North Korea.”North Korean leader “Kim Jong Un views this as — any kind of a kinetic attack or effort to force him to give up his nuclear weapons — is an existential threat to his nation and to his leadership in particular,” Coats said.

“The provocative nature and the instability that Kim has demonstrated potentially is a significant threat to the United States,” he said.US intelligence chiefs said Tuesday that Russian attempts to meddle in US politics are continuing unabated — and pose a threat to mid-term Congressional elections in November.

The heads of the CIA, FBI, NSA and three other spy agencies were unanimous in saying that Moscow’s efforts to disrupt US politics are as strong as they were in 2016.“Throughout the entire community, we have not seen any evidence of any significant change” in Russian behavior, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

America’s leading intelligence agencies concluded at the end of 2016 that Russian President Vladimir Putin had directed a broad intelligence effort to influence the presidential election that year to undermine the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump’s chances.

That effort included hacking and releasing emails and documents from the Clinton campaign, filling social media with posts and “news” items aimed at discrediting her, as well as targeting voter-registration operations and election databases.