On August 5, President Trump’s national security advisor H.R. McMaster said the United States is preparing to attack North Korea.

“What you’re asking is are we preparing plans for a preventive war, right?” McMaster said in response to a question during an MSNBC interview. “A war that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon. And the president’s been very clear about it. He said he’s not gonna tolerate North Korea being able to threaten the United States. If they have nuclear weapons that can threaten the United States. It’s intolerable from the president’s perspective. So of course, we have to provide all options to do that. And that includes a military option.”

The propaganda media, reading from a government script, insists North Korea is now capable of striking targets in the United States. Corporate scriveners and coiffured teleprompter readers on the alphabet networks tell us North Korea is now an imminent threat. “Pyongyang has revealed two types of ICBM during military parades, the KN-08, which can fly 7,000 miles, and the KN-14 with a range of 6,000 miles, Newsweek breathlessly reports. “It now appears that a significant portion of the continental United States is within range” of North Korean missiles, a former Korea analyst for the CIA, now ensconced at the Heritage Foundation, told The Guardian.

Sidelined by the hysterical reportage is the fact North Korea has big problems with its missile program. On July 28, North Korea launched what it described as an ICBM. Ankit Panda, a senior editor at The Diplomat, tweeted the missile launched from Mup’yong-ni in the Chagang province reached a 3,700 kilometer (2,300 miles) apogee and a 1,000 kilometer (620 miles) range. Panda is said to have cited a US source for the data. The missile apparently landed in the Sea of Japan.

The test flight was, however, a complete failure. After 47 minutes of flight, the missile burned out upon reentry, thus demonstrating North Korea is unable to deliver an ICBM warhead. Moreover, the Hermit Kingdom has yet to master missile guidance and navigation.

A previous missile test on the Fourth of July was also much ballyhooed by the media. James Kiessling, who works at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, threw cold water on that missile test. He said effective liquid fueled ICMBs are launched from silos, not trucks like the North Korean missiles. Kiessling and colleague Ralph Savelsberg wrote an analysis on July 21.

Kiessling and Savelsberg concluded the July 4^th missile was not an ICBM capable of striking the United States. The North Korea missile “clearly lacks any design margins to grow to the sort of performance that a real purpose-designed ICBM boasts. It’s too small and too close to zero payload at useful ranges. The HS-14 will not be threatening San Diego now or in two or 20 years. True, at low payloads, the HS-14 payload range capabilities exceed the arbitrary 5,500 km range value, but it’s not really a useful ICBM.”

Joe Pappalardo, writing for Popular Mechanics, said the July 4^th missile was not an ICBM. He described the missile as a hodgepodge—an old missile with a second stage “grafted” to it to extend the range.

As for the guidance necessary to hit targets, the authors note “North Korea probably can’t build a system accurate enough to target cities, given what we know about their access to Scud-class guidance… North Korea would need improved guidance technologies and demonstrate that they can be integrated with an ICBM range missile.”

Add to this the fact North Korea cannot develop a nuclear weapon capable of withstanding the rigors of reentry. Michael Elleman, a missile expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, writes “a number of critical questions remain about how soon Pyongyang could field a reliable weapon, not the least of which is whether or not North Korea can shield a nuclear warhead from the rigors of re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere at ICBM velocities.”

Another problem is the ability to miniaturize a nuclear weapon to fit on an ICBM. "The United States has not seen North Korea demonstrate an ability to miniaturize a warhead,” Department of Defense spokesperson Peter Cook said in 2014. This assessment was back up by photos of North Korea’s attempt to miniaturize published in the North Korean Rodong Sinmun newspaper. South Korea's Defense Ministry concluded Pyongyang does not possess the technology to create a functional miniature warhead.

North Korea’s ICBM and miniaturized nuke claims are all bark and no bite. In March, 2016 Kim Jong-un was photographed with a small, ball-like device South Korea claimed was a miniaturized nuclear warhead. "It's probably a mock-up. Kim Jong-un wouldn't be anywhere near the real thing,” explained Melissa Hanham, Senior Research Associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

North Korea is notorious for fake propaganda designed to convince its enemies that it is an advance nuclear player. In 2016, for instance, a California-based arms control nonprofit group examined footage of a supposedly successful North Korean missile launch. “Although the KN-11 appears to eject successfully, which is an improvement over November, we think that a catastrophic failure occurred at ignition. The DPRK has manipulated the footage in an attempt to obscure this result, but one clip plays for two frames too long,” writes Catherine Dill on her Arms Control Wink blog.

In April, it paraded missiles to mark the 105th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founding president, Kim Il-Sung. “I suspect they all might be mock-ups aimed to impress the outside world,” remarked Lee Il-Woo, a senior analyst at the private Korea Defense Network. BBC footage of the parade shows some of the rockets appear to have nose cones that wobbled.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are not, as much of the establishment claim, intended for a first strike on America and its allies. Appearing at the globalist Aspen Institute forum last month, Trump’s director of national intelligence Dan Coats averred that Kim Jong-un is not crazy, and certainly not suicidal. Coats said Kim Jong-un has “some rationale backing his actions” in developing nuclear weapons and systems to deliver them, burdened as that effort is. The 33-year-old dictator “has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.”

“The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes…  is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

In 2003, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to eliminate his country's weapons of mass destruction program, including a decades-old nuclear weapons program, as part of an effort to normalize relations with the West. When the Obama administration and NATO intervened in Libya in 2011, Gaddafi tried to use his voluntary disarmament as a bargaining chip to end the attack on his country. This did not persuade Obama and NATO to cease operations and as a result Libya fell and Gaddafi was brutally murdered.

“It’s impossible to overstate the danger associated with a rogue, brutal regime,” McMaster told Hugh Hewitt during his interview. Indeed, the North Korean regime is a danger—not to the United States, but his own people.

Neocons and Republican war-makers, most notably South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, are actively encouraging President Trump to attack North Korea. “There is a military option: to destroy North Korea’s nuclear program and North Korea itself,” Graham told the Today show. “He’s not going to allow—President Trump—the ability of this madman [Kim Jong Un] to have a missile that could hit America.

“If there’s going to be a war to stop him, it will be over there,” Graham added. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die over here—and he’s told me that to my face.”

Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis has admitted an attack on North Korea would be “catastrophic,” and would place allies of the United States in the region at extreme risk.

“The North Korean regime has hundreds of artillery cannons and rocket launchers within range of one of the most densely populated cities on earth, which is the capital of South Korea,” Mattis told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in May.

“This regime is a threat to the region, to Japan, to South Korea. And in the event of war, they would bring danger to China and to Russia as well,” he said. “But the bottom line is it would be a catastrophic war if this turns into a combat if we’re not able to resolve this situation through diplomatic means.”

Although Trump campaigned as a noninterventionist, since taking to the White House he has followed the path of previous administrations, especially in regard to North Korea. It stands as a pivotal link in the total war mentality that has ruled in America since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War.

“Instability in Korea has, for several decades, lined the pockets of those who profit from the business of war. Indeed, the Korean War rehabilitated a U.S. economy geared, as a result of World War II, toward total war,” writes Christine Hong.

“Far from being an intractable foe, North Korea has repeatedly asked the United States to sign a peace treaty that would bring the unresolved Korean War to a long-overdue end.”

Unfortunately, the merchants of death and their collaborators in Congress and the White House are not about to let that happen.

Kurt Nimmo, Newsbud Senior Producer & Analyst, is a writer, editor, producer and researcher based in New Mexico. His research centers on international geopolitics and national politics in the United States. He is the former lead editor and writer for Infowars and now edits Another Day in The Empire. His most recent books are Donald Trump and the War on Islam and Another Day in the Empire: The Reign of George W. Bush and the Total War Neocons.