Washington Won’t strike North Korea as It Knows Pyongyang Has Nukes

"Americans won’t strike [North] Korea, because not only do they suspect, but know for sure that Pyongyang has nuclear weapons,”Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with NTV channel.

"Regarding this issue, President [Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly said it was impossible to imagine that the US or someone else has 100 percent information on all of the [nuclear] objects,” he added.

"I’m not defending North Korea, I’m just saying that virtually everybody agrees with such analysis,” the minister said, adding that if the US hasn’t considered this assessment yet, then "the situation could spiral out of control, so that thousands, dozens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands innocent people will suffer in South Korea, as well as in the North, certainly in Japan, with Russia and China nearby too."

Lavrov stressed that most of the people he has spoken to on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, underway in New York, agree with this logic.

"The US carried out strikes on Iraq solely because they were 100 percent sure there were no weapons of mass destruction,” Lavrov said, adding that a UN commission had worked there, visiting all the sites in which they were interested in "a quite intrusive way.”

When the commission in Iraq reported that Baghdad had not fulfilled all the demands, "those who took the decision to attack Iraq knew perfectly well that the conclusion was a lie,” Lavrov announced.