During a weekend meeting, a Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned that President Donald Trump's increasingly hostile stance towards North Korea may have historically catastrophic results.
The Intercept reported Wednesday that Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) told the Munich Security Conference that Trump has "at his fingertips" the ability to trigger "one of the worst catastrophic events in the history of our civilization."
Trump, the Idaho Republican warned, is poised to start a "very, very brief" offensive war with North Korea to prevent their leader from "developing the capacity to deliver a nuclear warhead to the U.S. via an intercontinental ballistic missile," the Intercept noted.
Rather than utilizing diplomatic measures, the president may cause "mass casualties the likes of which the planet has never seen," Risch continued.
"There is no more dangerous place on the earth than the Korean peninsula right now," the senator told the German conference. "The president of the United States has said, and he is committed to, seeing that Kim Jong-un is not able to marry together a delivery system with a nuclear weapon that he can deliver to the United States."
The report went on to note that Risch is likely to become the chair of the Senate's foreign relations oversight panel if Republicans maintain control of the Senate and the current chairman, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), retires.
You can watch Risch deliver his comments below: