The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and its three accompanying warships would soon embark on its trip toward the East Sea of South Korea, having completed its joint exercise with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, according to the US and Korean officials.
THE declaration last week that the USA had sent an aircraft carrier barrelling towards waters off the Korean Peninsula put tensions with North Korea at boiling point.
Photos released by the Navy show that an aircraft carrier group was very far away from the Korean Peninsula, where it was supposedly headed as a show of force.
So was the Carl Vinson heading to North Korea, as the Trump administration said it was now doing, or was it heading to long-planned exercises in the Indian Ocean, as the Navy said it was doing?
The group consisted of aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, weighing 97,000 tons with 60 aircraft, as well as two guided-missile destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser.
A day earlier, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told Pentagon reporters the aircraft carrier was "on her way up there".
A week and a half ago it was reported that Admiral Harry Harris of US Pacific Command had told the carrier strike group to start sailing north, towards Korea, after the ships left Singapore on the 8th.
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The Vinson strike group deployed from its San Diego homeport January 5.
The show of force was met with aggressive rhetoric from the North Korean officials, who said on Monday that the US's military moves were creating "a unsafe situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment".
That was when tensions peaked over the possibility of North Korea's nuclear or missile test on the occasion of the birthday of national founder Kim Il-sung.
The White House announcement about the nuclear-armed strike force sparked fears across East Asia about a looming catastrophe - as rising tensions between the North and the USA dominated the news.
Vice President Mike Pence said that he does not believe the Defense Department intentionally misled the public about the whereabouts of a strike group in the Pacific Ocean.
It wasn't immediately clear if the mix-up was due to a deliberate attempt to psych out North Korea's leaders - or a false narrative resulting from miscommunications up the chain of command. As the New York Times reports, a few ships are not where the Trump White House said they were. "Very powerful. We have submarines". On April 11, USNI News reported that although the carrier had cancelled port calls in Australia, it had not canceled training events to move faster toward the Korean Peninsula, and would still take more than a week to enter waters near Korea - a point that was lost amid heated talk of "war".
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