U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly said that Washington and Pyongyang came closer to war than anyone could imagine in the midst of a series of nuclear and missile provocations by North Korea in 2017.

In his soon-to-be-published book "Rage," Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward quoted Trump from interviews held between December 2019 and July 2020, saying that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un must have also known about it as well.

Regarding the possibility of the North resuming long-range missile tests, Trump said Pyongyang would face problems "bigger than anybody's ever had before" if it did carry out a test.
 
The U.S. president, however, dismissed the regime's short-range missile launches as no big deal, saying, "there's no country that doesn't have them."

Trump also attributed his meetings with Kim in 2018 and 2019 to have helped avoid crises that could have pushed the two sides to start a war.