North Korea will never completely give up its nuclear weapons, a top defector said ahead of Kim Jong Un\u2019s landmark summit with United States President Donald Trump next month.<\/p>\n
The current whirlwind of diplomacy and negotiations will not end with \u201ca sincere and complete disarmament\u201d but with \u201ca reduced North Korean nuclear threat\u201d, said Thae Yong-ho, who fled his post as the North\u2019s deputy ambassador to Britain in August 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the end, North Korea will remain a nuclear power packaged as a non-nuclear state,\u201d Thae told the South\u2019s Newsis news agency.<\/p>\n
His remarks come ahead of an unprecedented summit between Kim and Trump in Singapore on June 12, at which North Korea\u2019s nuclear and missile programmes are expected to dominate the agenda.<\/p>\n
North and South Korea affirmed their commitment to the goal of denuclearisation of the peninsula at a summit last month, and Pyongyang announced at the weekend it would destroy its only known nuclear test site next week.<\/p>\n
South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday welcomed the announcement, calling it an \u201cinitial step in the complete denuclearisation of North Korea\u201d. But North Korea has not made public what concessions it is offering, and the South\u2019s JoongAng Ilbo daily pointed out that it had only invited journalists to witness the operation at the Punggye-ri site.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is regrettable that North Korea did not invite nuclear experts to the destruction of the test site,\u201d it said in an editorial. \u201cIf North Korea has really decided to denuclearise, it has no reason not to invite them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pyongyang has said it does not need nuclear weapons if the security of its regime is guaranteed.<\/p>\n
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has met Kim twice, said he was \u201cconvinced\u201d the North Korean leader shared US goals, and promised security assurances and bountiful American investment in the isolated nation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are the kind of things that, if we get what it is the President has demanded — the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation (CVID) of North Korea — that the American people will offer in spades,\u201d Pompeo said on Fox News Sunday.<\/p>\n
And Thae, one of the highest-ranking officials to have defected in recent years, said: \u201cNorth Korea will argue that the process of nuclear disarmament will lead to the collapse of North Korea and oppose CVID.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a party meeting last month Kim proclaimed the development of the North\u2019s nuclear force was complete and promised no more nuclear or missile tests. He called its arsenal \u201ca powerful treasured sword for defending peace\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiving it up soon after Kim Jong Un himself labelled it the \u2018treasured sword for defending peace\u2019 and a firm guarantee for the future? It can never happen,\u201d said Thae, who now lives in South Korea and whose memoir hit the shelves Monday.<\/p>\n
Tensions on and around the peninsula had been mounting for years as Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes saw it subjected to increasingly strict sanctions by the UN Security Council, the US, EU, South Korea and others.<\/p>\n
Trump last year threatened the North with \u201cfire and fury\u201d. But since the Winter Olympics in the South, Pyongyang and Washington have agreed to their unprecedented meeting.<\/p>\n
Kim has also twice visited China after failing to pay his respects to President Xi Jinping in the six years since he inherited power from his father. He also met the South\u2019s President Moon Jae-in in the Demilitarized Zone that divides their countries.<\/p>\n
On Monday Japanese media said an unidentified high-level North Korean official arrived in Beijing, reportedly to brief China about Pompeo\u2019s recent visit to Pyongyang. He returned with three freed US detainees, the latest in the North\u2019s diplomatic overtures.<\/p>\n
Pyongyang\u2019s sudden change in attitude was probably driven by the mounting international sanctions, which have included measures hitting sectors including coal, fish, textiles and overseas workers, Thae said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
North Korea will never completely give up its nuclear weapons, a top defector said ahead of Kim Jong Un\u2019s landmark summit with United States President Donald Trump next month. The current whirlwind of diplomacy and negotiations will not end with \u201ca sincere and complete disarmament\u201d but with \u201ca reduced North Korean nuclear threat\u201d, said Thae […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31096,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31097,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095\/revisions\/31097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}