The war drums are beating on both sides of the Pacific as President Donald Trump ratchets up his warnings that the U.S. may take military action against North Korea if Kim Jong Un tests another nuclear weapon, as his regime is expected to do as early as Saturday. On Thursday, NBC News reported that the U.S. is prepared to launch a pre-emptive strike with conventional weapons if Kim reaches for the nuclear trigger. According to intelligence officials, the U.S. military could target the North Korean nuclear test site with Tomahawk cruise missiles, bombs, or “cyber and special operations on the ground.” Already, two destroyers equipped with Tomahawk missiles have positioned themselves within striking distance of North Korea’s nuclear test site as a show of force, while heavy bombers are on standby in Guam.

The NBC News story was reportedly rejected by senior defense officials as “wildly wrong” and ”crazy,” and the Pentagon declined to comment. Trump himself was characteristically ambiguous, telling reporters that he didn’t know if his decision to drop the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan on Thursday was a message to North Korea, but “it doesn’t make any difference if it does or not.” North Korea, he said, “is a problem, the problem will be taken care of.”

Hours later, with global tensions flaring, he got on Air Force One and flew to Mar-a-Lago, his private beachside club in Palm Beach, for the weekend. He did not bring any of his usual top aides, a White House official told CNN, because it is a holiday weekend.

As is the case with the Trump administration’s broader foreign policy, how exactly the president plans to handle the growing North Korean nuclear threat remains maddeningly—if purposefully—unclear. As tensions between North Korea and the U.S. have steadily risen in recent weeks, the Trump administration has made a series of ominous, ever-shifting statements about the possibility of military action. Last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during a trip to South Korea that the “the policy of strategic patience has ended” and warned that if North Korea were to “elevate the threat,” Trump might strike. Weeks later, during his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump declared that if China fails to adequately address the growing nuclear threat North Korea poses, he is prepared to take unilateral action. “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you,” he said during an interview with the Financial Times. He reiterated this stance on Thursday, tweeting that while he has “great confidence” in China, if it fails to “properly deal” with North Korea, the “U.S. and its allies will.”

Foreign policy experts caution that there are few good options for dealing with North Korea, a reclusive, rogue state whose military ambitions have flummoxed decades of U.S. presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. And while Trump’s newly aggressive stance seems to be pushing China to put more pressure on Pyongyang, administration officials are quietly downplaying the possibility of real military action. Per the Wall Street Journal: