North Korea will not agree to “unilateral nuclear abandonment,” a regime official declared in a statement Tuesday night, insulting national security adviser John Bolton and raising doubts about whether President Trump’s summit with dictator Kim Jong Un will take place.
“It is a ridiculous comedy to see that the Trump administration, claiming to take a different road from the previous administrations, still clings to the outdated policy on the DPRK — a policy pursued by previous administrations at the same time when the DPRK was at the stage of nuclear development,” senior diplomat Kim Kye Gwan said in a Wednesday statement released by state-run media and re-published by the New York Times.
“[I]f the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit,” Kim added.
A flurry of high-profile encounters between North Korean, South Korean and American leaders raised optimism for the prospects of Trump’s meeting with the young dictator. The president announced the scheduled date of the meeting just last week, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned from a planning trip to North Korea with three American detainees. But North Korea repudiated the outlines of the agreement touted by the administration and harshly criticized Bolton.
“High-ranking officials of the White House and the Department of State including Bolton … are letting loose the assertions of so-called Libya mode of nuclear abandonment … while talking about formula of ‘abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterwards,’” the first vice minister of North Korean Foreign Affairs said in the statement. “We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feelings of repugnance towards him.”
The statement also repudiated the idea of surrendering nuclear weapons in exchange for economic cooperation with the United States. “The U.S. is trumpeting as if it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon [nuclear weapons],” he said. “But we have never had any expectation of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future, too.”
That’s a clear contradiction of Pompeo’s report following a meeting with Kim last week.
“If North Korea takes bold action to quickly denuclearize, the United States is prepared to work with North Korea to achieve prosperity on the par with our South Korean friends,” he told reporters. “We talked about the fact that America has often in history had adversaries who we are now close partners with and our hope that we could achieve the same with respect to North Korea.”
North Korea also cited the ongoing U.S.-South Korean military exercises, a surprise to the State Department in light of previous agreements the war games would proceed. State-run media also published bulletins denouncing the State Department’s criticism of the regime in a recently-released annual human rights report.
“The U.S. gets hell-bent on putting pressure on the DPRK, raising the non-existent ‘human rights issue’ ahead of the DPRK-U.S. dialogue,” the editorial said. “For the U.S. to cling to the provocative anti-DPRK ‘human rights’ racket is little short of turning the trend of dialogue and peace back to the phase of confrontation and tension and, this may spoil the last hard-won opportunity of solving the issue.”
