Pentagon had to intervene and stop a tweet by US President Donald Trump before being interpreted by North Koreans as a sign of an upcoming war, says a veteran journalist who has written a book about the president.

Trump had apparently tweeted that Washington is pulling out its dependents from South Korea, signifying an imminent onset of a war to depose Pyongyang, Bob Woodward said in an interview with CBS.

“He drafts a tweet saying, ‘We are going to pull our dependents from South Korea — family members of the 28,000 people there’,” said the renowned Watergate journalist. “At that moment, there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that, ‘My God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as ‘an attack is imminent.”

The veteran journalist has been promoting his book, which describes a paranoid White House under the New York billionaire, called Fear: Trump in the White House.

His comments came as North Korea was marking the 70th anniversary of its establishment with massive ceremonies and a military parades, yet toning it down by excluding intercontinental ballistic missiles from the event.

‘2nd Trump-Kim summit’

The US has been engaged in diplomacy with Pyongyang after a summit between Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un in June, but with little progress.

The White House is meanwhile coordinating a second Trump-Kim meeting as Trump has received what the White House described as a “very warm, very positive letter” from the North Korean leader.

“The primary purpose of the letter was to request and look to schedule another meeting with the president,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters at the press briefing Monday.

She also commented on the parade, asserting that “for once, [it] was not about their nuclear arsenal,” while the letter was “further evidence of progress” in the Trump administration’s attempts to deal with Pyongyang.