President Trump’s top national security adviser is warning North Korea not to renew missile tests as negotiations to dismantle the regime’s nuclear weapons program have stalled out.
“They issued an unhelpful statement saying they were thinking of going back to nuclear and ballistic missile testing, which would not be a good idea on their part,” John Bolton said during a radio interview that aired Sunday morning.
Trump hoped to strike a breakthrough bargain with dictator Kim Jong Un last month, when they traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam for their second face-to-face meeting in less than a year. The president ended the summit when the North Korean leader demanded that the United States provide “many, many billions of dollars” of sanctions relief in exchange for restraints on just a limited part of the regime’s nuclear weapons program, according to a senior State Department official.
“The North Koreans really, unfortunately, were not willing to do what they needed to do,” Bolton told John Catsimatidis, a New York-based radio host on AM970.
But a senior North Korean diplomat blamed Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for the breakdown. She added that Kim might end the missile testing freeze that he imposed in April of 2018 as the two sides prepared for the first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore.
“Whether to maintain this moratorium or not is the decision of our chairman of the state affairs commission,” Choe Son Hui, the North Korean deputy foreign minister, told reporters. “He will make his decision in a short period of time.”
Pompeo recalled Friday that Kim told Trump, during their Hanoi meeting, that he would not start the tests again. A flurry of tests in 2017 pushed Trump to warn of “fire and fury” if the regime continued racing to acquire the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States.
“President Trump wants to see this threat resolved through negotiation,” Bolton said. “He’s made a number of proposals to Kim Jong Un … It hasn’t worked out yet, but the president still is willing to try and do it. He wants North Korea to be free of nuclear weapons, that’s for sure.”
