FOXNews.com: Kerry to press China on North Korea amid missile test threats

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Kerry to press China on North Korea amid missile test threats Apr 13th 2013, 06:37 Are US officials underestimating North Korea? Administration doing damage control on N. Korea nuke intel Is North Korea a credible threat? Secretary of State John Kerry meets with China's leaders Saturday in an attempt to get Beijing to join the United States in pressuring North Korea amid heightened rhetoric about tests of its missile and nuclear programs. Kerry's arrival in Beijing comes a day after he participated in talks with South Korean officials in Seoul and warned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un not to test fire a missile. "If Kim Jong Un decides to launch a missile, whether it's across the Sea of Japan or some other direction, he will be choosing willfully to ignore the entire international community," Kerry told reporters. Kerry's trip marks his first foray to the Asia-Pacific as America's top diplomat, spearheading the effort to "pivot" U.S. power away from Europe and the Middle East and toward the world's most populous region and fulcrum of economic growth. And it comes on the heels of months of provocative action and warlike rhetoric from Pyongyang, including talk of nuclear strikes against the United States — however outlandish analysts consider such threats. No one is discounting the danger entirely after tests of a nuclear device and ballistic missile technology in recent months. Kerry's trip was planned well in advance of the latest danger to destabilize the Korean peninsula: North Korea's apparent preparations for another missile test in defiance of United Nations resolutions. The crisis clearly has overtaken the rest of his Asian agenda. The Obama administration believes North Korea is preparing for another missile test, said a senior State Department official traveling with Kerry on the plane to Seoul. "We will show to our allies that we are prepared and we will defend them," the official said. To mitigate the threat, however, Kerry is largely depending on China to take a bigger role in pressuring North Korea to live up to previous agreements to halt its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. It's a strategy that has worked poorly for the U.S. for more than two decades. Beijing has the most leverage with Pyongyang. It has massively boosted trade with its communist neighbor and maintains close military ties. And the U.S. believes the Chinese could take several specific steps to show North Korea it cannot threaten regional stability with impunity. These include getting China to cut off support for North Korea's weapons of mass destruction program, said the State Department official and another senior administration official, though they rejected that the U.S. was seeking a commercial embargo against the North. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about Kerry's meetings in advance. Neither could say, however, whether Pyongyang under its enigmatic young leader, Kim Jong Un, was actually listening at this point. One of them stressed that he "wouldn't say there is no conversation between them," but declined to describe the level and impact of Chinese-North Korean contacts. Obama administration officials on Friday scrambled to downplay the errant disclosure of a classified portion of an intelligence report finding that North Korea has advanced its nuclear knowledge to the point that it could arm a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead. The analysis, disclosed Thursday at a hearing on Capitol Hill, says the Pentagon's intelligence wing has "moderate confidence" that North Korea has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles but that the weapon was unreliable. A U.S. official in Seoul said Friday it is "premature" to say North Korea has developed the expertise to make a nuclear weapon small enough to put on a ballistic missile. "It is a very difficult task," the official told Fox News. "They haven't been able to put everything together." The official also says there is no indication a North Korea missile launch is imminent, saying officials "have not seen activity" that would show that a launch will happen soon, or that the country is planning a large scale attack. At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney reiterated that North Korea has not demonstrated the capability to deploy a nuclear-armed missile. Fox News' Justin Fishel, Greg Palkot, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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