Nuclear Credit Where None is Due.
COOPER: The breaking news tonight, you can file any notion that President Trump will dial back his rhetoric on North Korea, alongside the notion that North Korea would tone their rhetoric down as well. Pyongyang has more to say tonight. And as before, it's fierier. Our chief national correspondent Jim Sciutto has that and joins us. So, what's the response been exactly from North Korea today?</s>JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, this is North Korea actually responding to Trump's previous bellicose statements, and coming really straight out of North Korean, typical North Korean invective. You hear -- have them saying that the U.S. would suffer a shameful defeat and final doom. They go on to say the vow to mercilessly wipe out the provocateurs, making desperate efforts to stifle the socialist country. This is typical North Korean invective straight out of the North Korean thesaurus. What is different now, of course, you have the American president matching North Korea to some degree, blow to blow in this rhetorical back-and-forth there. It remains a rhetorical escalation, a military escalation, but certainly incendiary language coming from both sides.</s>COOPER: Yes. The Secretary of Defense Mattis was asked about North Korea at an event to California, what did he say?</s>SCIUTTO: That's right. And this is the second time in two days that you've had a cabinet secretary moderate, you could say, the president's language on North Korea. This time, it's Secretary of Defense James Mattis, saying very clearly, that diplomacy is the U.S. priority right now with North Korea. Have a listen.</s>JAMES MATTIS, DEFENSE SECRETARY: My portfolio, my mission, my responsibility is to have military options, should they be needed. However, right now, Secretary Tillerson, Ambassador Haley, you can see the American effort is diplomatically led. It has diplomatic traction. It is gaining diplomatic results. And I want to stay right there right now. The tragedy of war is well enough known. It doesn't need another characterization beyond the fact that it would be catastrophic.</s>SCIUTTO: Mattis, of course, has commanded U.S. forces in war. He very much knows the military -- consequences of military action. It should be noticed that President Trump as well earlier today also mentioned the possibility of a diplomatic off-ramp for North Korea. But that comment, of course, lost in the more incendiary rhetoric we're hearing from the president as well.</s>COOPER: Yes, very different message from Mattis. Jim Sciutto, thanks. Before bringing the panel back in, I want to focus briefly on something else the president said today. It's not the first time he said and keeping them honest, it's not the first time the facts of the matter contradict him. Here he is today suggesting he has revamped, or in his words renovated the country's nuclear arsenal just since taking office.</s>TRUMP: The first order I gave to my generals, and, you know, my first order was, I want this, our nuclear arsenal to be the biggest and the finest in the world. We've spend a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and it's in tip-top shape, and getting better, and getting stronger. Until such time as this scourge disappears, we will be so much better and so much stronger than anybody else. And nobody, including North Korea, is going to be threatening us with anything.</s>REPORTER: Sir, what specifically have you changed in the nuclear arsenal? And the reason I asked is that a lot of experts yesterday in response to your tweet said that modernizing the arsenal takes many years. It can't be done in six months. It's a long process that's just been done.</s>TRUMP: We've done a lot of modernization, but we've done a lot of renovation, and we have it now in very, very good shape. It will be in much better shape in the next six months to a year.</s>COOPER: Keeping them honest now, here's what the president has actually done about the nuclear stockpile. In the 27th of January, he signed a memo directing the secretary of defense to conduct a nuclear posture review to, quote, ensure the U.S. nuclear deterrent is modern, robust, flexible, ready and appropriately tailored to deter 21st century threats and reassure our allies. Now, in reality, that review is required by the Congress. Back in April, the Pentagon reported it was under way and expected to issue a report by year's end. Separately, there's already a forced modernization program under way, began actually during the last administration. The arsenal has been undergoing modernization for the last eight or so months, but the program was actually launched under the prior administration. General Hertling, and the entire panel joins us again. General Hertling, you heard the president boasting specifically about U.S. nuclear capability that has gone under a big renovation since he's been in office, I mean, does that make any sense?</s>HERTLING: It didn't, Anderson, because I was on the joint staff back in 2000 -- I think it was 2002 when one of the last nuclear posture reviews, the NPRs as we call it, was conducted. It's a statutory thing. It occurs every five years. It's not something new. And in fact, this started when there was some problems with the nuclear programs over the last two years with deficiencies. So, actually, this started under the last administration. The other thing that I kind of winced at was when the president said we're bigger and stronger than ever before. The START Treaty has just been in effect over the last -- well, the treaty has been in effect for a long time, but we have just reduced the number of nuclear weapons to 400. It's the lowest rate it's ever been since the buildup of the 1950s. So, it's not bigger and stronger. It may be looking at modernization, but there's less weapons than we've ever had before. So, all of the things he said were a misstatement or some might call it a flat-out lie.</s>COOPER: General Hertling, I mean, in your experience, when you're making -- when you're challenging somebody or making a threat to somebody, I assume it's better to be factual in your capabilities than to puff your capabilities up and not be able to -- and then be corrected?</s>HERTLING: Yes. That's the way I think most people like to do it. You want to appear more -- you want to appear stronger than you talk about. So, in other words, you don't want to be threatening, and not have the ability to back it up. You actually want people to think, what's he got behind his back? What is he or she going to do next? You don't lay all your cards on the table and say what you're going to do. It's interesting, Mr. Trump has said from the beginning he's not going to -- he's not going to portray what he's going to do next, he's doing that right now. In fact, he's taken it to the next level with North Korea, and he shouldn't be there.</s>COOPER: Admiral Kirby, I mean, just looking at this from a different perspective, that the rhetoric from the president, kind of bellicose rhetoric, may push China or Russia to try to push North Korea, try to ratchet down the threats, but also to actually make some progress?</s>KIRBY: I think it's possible that that's what he thinks, Anderson, that it could do, but I don't think it will. Look, President Xi is not going to be bullied, and we've seen that time and time again. They are the key to try to solve the problem in Pyongyang. That road runs through Beijing. I think the president and his team were right to try to exploit and use it, but not through tweets, not through bully, not through trade war, you know, threats, and not through this kind of rhetoric. It's not going to impact President Xi. He's a cool, calculating figure. He's betting that a nuclear armed North is still better for him than a violently reunified North with American troops across the Yalu River. And so, it's not -- we haven't convinced him yet that it's in his best interests to really take aggressive action to help us stop this threat.</s>COOPER: Gloria, I mean, there's irony in the fact that the secretary of defense, whose nickname is Mad Dog, is the one who is ratcheting this down and being very sober in his -- I mean, he's somebody who has actually seen combat, who actually knows what war looks like. You know, which the president has not served. And to actually have Mattis be the one saying, look, we don't need to describe this in any other way other than cataclysmic.</s>BORGER: I mean, you couldn't help in that clip that Jim Sciutto showed, you couldn't help but look at General Mattis and see him as a sober diplomat almost. And he becomes the diplomat in this situation. Because he knows what happens in war. And he -- you know, compare it to the president's kind of apocalyptic language, versus the kind of sober demeanor of Mattis, the quiet demeanor of somebody who's been to war and understands it. It was sort of -- it was just striking to me.</s>COOPER: Yes.</s>BORGER: And when you look at Trump, I was thinking about this today, it's very much like a real estate guy saying, OK, my building is the biggest, it's the best, and I'm going to -- you know, this is what I can tell you, because you're going to have to go and check me out and there's no way you can figure out that it isn't. And I think he's using the same kind of tactics he's used his entire life in real estate in New York, only it doesn't work in international diplomacy. And it certainly won't work with North Korea.</s>COOPER: Yes. Just a correction, I think General Mattis, I said he used the word cataclysmic. I think he used the word catastrophic.</s>BORGER: OK.</s>COOPER: Anyway, Phil, I mean, the other part of this, the whole thing, the U.S. doesn't have particular good on the ground intelligence from North Korea. Are you confident that if North Korea was serious in carrying through with their threat, the U.S. would actually know about it ahead of time from aerial surveillance?</s>MUDD: Confident, heck, no. I would give that about a zero. There's two aspects of any intelligence problem. That is capability and intent. Over the past week, I understand, you've seen U.S. intelligence assessments in particular from the Defense Intelligence Agency about capability. Can North Korea put together a missile that has a miniaturized nuclear warhead delivered against a point target like Guam? I suspect that is not true. I don't think they can. The second aspect of this is even more difficult. If you have that capability, and you're a North Korean leader, how confident are you that you know what the North Korean leadership wants to do? Are they bluffing? Do they really intend to do something in August? Do they know where they're going to be in 2020, or 2025? If you put together that issue of capability and intent, and the fact that North Korea is inaccessible, let me give you a judgment, bottom line, Vegas bet. The United States intelligence community does not have a good understanding of what the North Korean leadership wants to do, and we should not pretend otherwise.</s>COOPER: We've got to take another break. We're going to have more with the panel ahead. The president finally addressed the move by Vladimir Putin against more than 700 U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow. But if you thought the president might finally criticize Russia for something, you would be wrong. We're going to show you what the president said that has so many people either shaking or scratching their heads.