North Korea’s equivalent of a pistol is an intercontinental ballistic missile that carries a nuclear warhead. Were Pyongyang to develop one, it would gain the capacity to incinerate parts of the United States or its Pacific territories. In recent months, the North Korean government has conducted tests apparently designed to construct such a weapon. (The Defense Intelligence Agency last month suggested that such a weapon already exists.) And Pyongyang recently suggested it might even conduct a nuclear test in the atmosphere, which would pose a threat of radiation.

This is worrisome. The world does not need more weapons capable of flattening cities on the other side of the globe. It certainly does not need them in the hands of a regime as insular, and thus prone to miscalculation, as North Korea’s. Still, there is little evidence that North Korea is planning to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States or its allies. Pyongyang has likely possessed nuclear weapons for more than a decade; it has never used them for the obvious reason that doing so would likely prompt a devastating American response. It has possessed biological and chemical weapons since the 1970s or 1980s; it has never used them against the United States or its allies either. (Though it may have proliferated them to third parties like Syria, as the U.S. did to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and against domestic political opponents.)

One might argue that, were North Korea about to test a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile in the atmosphere—a test the U.S. could not be certain would fall harmlessly in the ocean rather than on Los Angeles—an American strike might legitimately be considered “preemptive.” But the Times and Post regularly use the term to describe not just a potential American strike to thwart a North Korean atmospheric test, but any American strike aimed at delaying or destroying North Korea’s nuclear program. In April, months before North Korea suggested an atmospheric nuclear test, the Times referred to a potential American “pre-emptive strike” against North Korea’s nuclear “facilities.”

Why do these linguistic errors matter? Because they normalize something that Americans once considered monstrous. As I’ve explained in more detail elsewhere, at the dawn of the nuclear age, America’s leaders considered preventive war—war to prevent an adversary merely from gaining weapons that might shift the balance of power in its favor—both immoral and un-American. As West Point Professor Scott Silverstone details in his book, Preventive War and American Democracy, they associated it with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. NSC 68, the legendary document that in 1950 outlined America’s strategy for combatting the USSR, declared that, “It goes without saying that the idea of ‘preventive’ war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans.” When he unveiled a new national security strategy in 1955, Dwight Eisenhower similarly insisted that, “[t]he United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventive war.” In explaining John F. Kennedy’s refusal to launch a preventive attack during the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy explained: “My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s.”