“It’s crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “So, I want them [the Pentagon] to stop sending dependents and I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea."

"We're getting close to a military conflict because North Korea is marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that can not only get to America, but deliver the weapon. We’re running out of time,” Graham said, referencing North Korea's test of a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Wednesday. Pyongyang says the test was of a Hwasong-15 ICBM, which is capable of hitting the US mainland.

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The comments come just days after Graham said the US will go to war with North Korea "if things don't change," despite acknowledging that "a lot of people would get hurt and killed" if a war broke out.

Graham's Sunday remarks come ahead of joint US-South Korea drills which are set to kick off on Monday and run until December 8. The annual exercise prompted Pyongyang to accuse US President Donald Trump of "begging" for nuclear war.

The Republican senator's view that war is becoming more of a reality between the US and North Korea echoed remarks made by White House national security adviser HR McMaster on Saturday. "I think it's increasing every day, which means that we are in a race, really, we are in a race to be able to solve this problem," he said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, as cited by CNN.