Author and professor Tim Beal, whose most recent book is "Crisis in Korea," told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Tuesday that the mainstream media is notorious for making up stories in an effort to sabotage the peace talks between the US and North Korea.
"The whole mainstream media is worried about peace breaking out as, of course, the Pentagon is. All these people make their money stoking up fear about war. As far as I understand from the Washington Post article, they are not even claiming new missiles. They are just claiming work on existing missiles," Beal told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker Tuesday.
According to the Washington Post article, which cited unnamed US officials familiar with the intelligence, North Korea is renovating a factory that was used to build the government's first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).
The evidence suggests that North Korea is working on at least one, possibly two, liquid-fueled ICBMs at a research facility near Pyongyang, the report added.
"They [US intelligence organizations] take photographs in space of buildings, and then they [the mainstream media] decide what they think is in them. In that same Washington Post article they talked about a research institute, which they claimed a couple months ago was doing uranium enrichment," Beal told Sputnik.
"The article admits that European intelligence experts don't agree with that. So, who knows what they [the mainstream media] are arguing about and what evidence they've got? This is all part of the pushback against the possibility of peace. These stories will keep on coming out. The point is, they want to derail any movement toward peace," Beal added.
North Korea made rapid progress in nuclear weapons research last year, conducting its strongest atomic test to date and testing a series of missiles. On June 12, 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met with US President Donald Trump in Singapore, where the two leaders came to an agreement that requires Pyongyang to denuclearize in exchange for a freeze of US-South Korean military drills and eventual sanctions relief.
"We know that American intelligence on North Korea is pretty shonky. Apparently, there was another American Minuteman test. This is going on at the same time that they [the US] are complaining about North Koreans not denuclearizing. The hypocrisy is pretty astounding. In this sort of climate, you get people making up all types of stories to make money, and they get away with it," Beal noted.
On Tuesday, the US Air Force terminated a test of an unarmed Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile due to an "anomaly" in flight, according to reports. The LGM-30G Minuteman III version is the only land-based ICBM in service in the United States.
"An anomaly is any unexpected event during the test. Since anomalies may arise from many factors relating to the operational platform itself, or the test equipment, careful analysis is needed to identify the cause," Air Force Global Strike Command said in a statement Tuesday, the Defense Post reported.