Any military option against North Korea, whether big or small, carries a significant risk of leading to full-scale war that could claim millions of lives, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Talk of pre-emptive strikes against the North has come to the fore after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday that all options were on the table in dealing with the communist nation and the military option was one of them.

On Sunday, The New York Times looked into three possible military options -- a single strike to halt a missile launch, a set of strikes to devastate nuclear and missile facilities, and a war to destroy the North Korean government outright.

"Almost any plan would bring a high risk of unintended escalation to all-out war, analysts believe. It would place millions of South Korean and Japanese civilians in the crosshairs of North Korean weapons with few guaranteed benefits," the paper said.

"That officials would even raise a pre-emptive attack shows the growing severity of the crisis, but the problems associated with any such plan demonstrate why that crisis has remained unsolved for two decades," it said.

Even if the US attempts to strike a missile on a launch pad, it would be impossible to prevent all nuclear missiles from getting off the ground, the paper said. Such a strike and attacks on the nuclear and missile facilities are sure to prompt retaliation that would lead to full-scale war, it said.

The North would also use nuclear and chemical weapons in the event of war, it said.

"Any limited American attack plan would have to assume such retaliation -- a potentially high cost to pay for strikes that would probably impose only temporary delays on the country's nuclear development," the paper said. "North Korea would perceive even a limited strike as the start of a war and respond with its full arsenal."

It also said that military strikes may be an imperfect tool for solving what is essentially a political problem: the leadership's belief that it requires an advanced nuclear program to survive.

"Strikes short of war would risk deepening, rather than altering, this calculus," it said. "Strikes that led to war would risk exactly the nuclear exchange they are meant to forestall." (Yonhap)