While we’ve always considered North Korea a hair trigger away from snapping and bombing everything around them, it may actually be even closer to reality than that.

Japan’s defense minister is sounding off a dire warning about North Korea while meeting with General Mattis this week. Here’s what he had to say, according to Newsweek.

“The country has steadfastly improved its nuclear and missiles capability,” Defense Minister Itsunori Odonera said Monday. “Therefore, we have to take calibrated and different responses to meet that level of threat.” He did not expand on what he meant by “different responses.”

His remarks came during a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis and South Korea’s defense minister, Song Young-moo, in the Philippines.

Song agreed during the meeting that North Korea’s “provocative behavior is becoming worse and worse,” while Mattis contended the reclusive nation continues to “threaten regional and global security.”

Kim Jong Un’s regime has been a blusterous one from the get-go, and even moreso than his father’s was, but the transition to a nuclear state is an alarming one, and its hostility to the United States and anyone allied to us is a major problem.

It’s not clear how much of a threat North Korea would end up being – it is likely they would be fairly quickly neutralized – but just one nuclear weapon going off is enough to devastate the countries around them, should one happen to do so.

One of the better foreign policy stances of Donald Trump’s has been to be tough on North Korea, but they are a country that will recognize hesitation as weakness. Therefore, it is imperative that Trump, unlike his predecessor, follows through on his red lines.