WASHINGTON -- The United States should carry out a "massive cyber-attack" on North Korea to disable its capabilities to launch missiles, an American lawmaker said Thursday.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, made the case as tensions with North Korea have spiked over its two intercontinental ballistic missile tests in July.

Just last week US President Donald Trump threatened to rain "fire and fury" on Pyongyang, to which the North Korean leadership responded with plans to fire ballistic missiles towards Guam.

"The Trump administration is right to respond with all the urgency the president's words signify," Rohrabacher said in a news release. "It all sounds like madness, as indeed a nuclear exchange would be, but for decades we have been playing a slow-motion game of diplomatic depravity that could only lead to this perilous juncture."

The lawmaker offered two options to the Pentagon: shooting down any missile launched by North Korea, and a "coordinated, massive cyber-attack on North Korea's infrastructure, disabling the dictatorship's communications and its missile-launch capabilities."

"The ultimate goal, of course, must be regime change, and we may hope that North Korea's sponsors in China also recognize that necessity," he said. (Yonhap)