A U. S. aircraft carrier the Navy had said was heading toward the Korean Peninsula amid rising tensions has not yet started sailing to the region, a U.S. defense official acknowledged Tuesday.
Other Pentagon officials told CNN that the USS Carl Vinson supercarrier and its strike group won’t arrive near Korean until the end of the month.
The Navy on April 8 said it was directing a naval strike group headed by the USS Carl Vinson supercarrier to ‘sail north’ as a ‘prudent measure’ to deter North Korea.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis on April 11 said the Vinson was ‘on her way up’ to the peninsula. President Donald Trump the next day said on the Fox Business Network that ‘we are sending an armada. Very powerful.’
But a Defense Department official on Tuesday said the ships remained off the northwest coast of Australia.
A Navy photograph showed the Vinson off Java over the weekend, traveling through the Sunda Straight.
‘They are going to start heading north towards the Sea of Japan within next 24 hours,’ the official said on condition of anonymity.
The official added that the strike group wouldn’t be in the region before next week at the earliest.
It is thousands of nautical miles from the Java Sea to the Sea of Japan.
At the time of the strike group’s deployment, many media outlets said the ships were steaming toward North Korea, when in fact they had temporarily headed in the opposite direction.
News that the U. S. hadn’t followed through on its threat to North Korea was greeted in Chinese media with raucous laughter on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
‘Tricked badly!’ the Global Times chirped on its social media account.
‘None of the U. S. aircraft carriers that South Korea is desperately waiting for has come!’
The United States ratcheted up its rhetoric ahead of North Korea’s military parade and failed missile launch over the weekend, and Vice President Mike Pence on Monday declared that the era of US ‘strategic patience’ in dealing with Pyongyang was over.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un responded with his own fiery warnings and threatened to conduct weekly missile tests.
The strike group has been conducting drills with the Australian navy in recent days, the official said.
It has scrapped a planned port visit in Australia as a result of sailing north.
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