CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta revealed in his memoirs that US war plans against North Korea recently included the option of a nuclear strike.

CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta revealed in his memoirs that US war plans against North Korea recently included the option of a nuclear strike.

Panetta described a 2010 briefing in Seoul by General Walter L. ‘Skip’ Sharp, the commander of US forces in South Korea, where it was made clear that the nuclear option was on the table if North Korean forces crossed into the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the North and the South.

“If North Korea moved across the border, our war plans called for the senior American general on the peninsula to take command of all US and South Korea forces and defend South Korea— including by the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary,” Panetta wrote in ‘Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace’.

Panetta added that he left the briefing with “the powerful sense that war in that region was neither hypothetical nor remote.”

Reactions to Panetta’s remarks ranged from shrugs to astonishment that he would so breezily raise the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. Some experts call Panetta’s pronouncement on U.S. policy unrealistic – and even dangerously misleading, while others consider that Panetta did not write anything unexpected.

Meanwhile, a political commentator and international lawyer, Barry Grossman, says Panetta’s remarks are a scaremongering tactic to distract public attention and sell his new book.

In a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday, Barry Grossman said, “The US routinely plays the North Korea card as if it is the joker in a high stakes poker game, when in reality it is more like the ‘free spot’ in a Saturday afternoon Bingo game for pensioners.”

Grossman, who is based on Indonesia’s island of Bali, said, “My first inclination on reading this so-called news was to assume that the absurdity of the US policy on ISIL must be drawing so much heat that the recent carefully cultivated hysteria about the Ebola virus is no longer enough to draw public attention away from both  the obvious contradictions in the US Syria/Iraq policy, and the contrived conflict between Turkish President Recep Erdogan and John Kerry which was clearly intended to portray the US as reluctant to attack President Assad but has largely backfired.”