A top US general with responsibility for protecting the US from foreign attack said North Korea's test of a nuclear weapon was taking the nation on the path to getting 'thumped'. Lieutenant-General Joseph Inge, the deputy commander of US Northern Command, which has responsibility for defending US territory, made his comments in front of an audience of army officers and defence contractors at the US Army's major annual conference on Tuesday. 'Many of you served in Korea and you know the people there are just flat-ass unpredictable. What they'll do next, how their logic works, is fundamentally different from our logic,' General Inge said. 'Because most of us would agree that setting off a nuclear explosion and building a weapon you can put on the tip of a missile is not the way to get your opposition to come to the negotiating table. It's probably a good way to get your butt thumped, if you continue to persist in that direction. But that's not a problem for me, it's a problem for our civilian leaders to figure out. But it's troubling times.' The general also showed the audience a poster that he said was displayed during a parade in North Korea. The poster pictured a missile with writing in Korean that the general said meant: 'North Korea is united in one mind, ready to fight to the death. America: Look straight at the North Korean national power.' 'Clearly it's propaganda for their people but it tells you something about the people who are building this capability,' he said. General Inge also spoke about North Korea's launch this summer of seven missiles, one long-range Taepodong 2 and six short-range Scud-class missiles. He said the US was aware the launch was going to take place but had not known what the nature of the launch would be. 'We didn't know their intentions. We didn't know if it was a space launch or a ballistic launch,' he said. 'We had reason to believe ... it was likely to be a space satellite. And we knew that if it launched and failed, and we shot at it, and we didn't know for sure what it was, we could expect they would say, 'Hey, you guys shot down our space launch, which we have the right, as a peaceful nation, to do'.' The US is developing a missile defence system that was briefly activated in July in response to those launches. 'Heretofore, I think I can argue that the radar people knew what the radars did, the missile people knew what the missiles did ... but we had not given enough thought to how it worked as a system.'
