JAPAN is reportedly working on arranging a meeting between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, with one possibility including the premier’s visit to Pyongyang around August.

Citing multiple government sources, the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Thursday that officials from the two countries had been in contact several times in recent months to negotiate a possible meeting between their leaders.

The news comes amid reports that US President Donald Trump has now officially been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump this week agreed to halt joint US-South Korean military exercises after meeting with the North Korean leader in Singapore, drills Japan’s defence minister said were “vital” for East Asian security.

North Korea fired at least two missiles over Japan last year as it sought to develop a weapon capable of reaching the US mainland with a nuclear warhead. Japan is expected to contribute towards the costs of North Korea’s denuclearisation but only after the International Atomic Energy Agency restarts inspections, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

Abe has made the resolution of the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea a political pledge, and has said Japan would hold back economic assistance until those issues, along with denuclearisation, are resolved.

If Abe’s visit to Pyongyang proves difficult, Japan is eyeing another scenario for Abe to meet Kim on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum to be held in September in Vladivostok, if the North Korean leader attends, the paper said.

A government source familiar with the matter told Reuters that Japanese officials planned to discuss the summit meeting with North Korean officials at an international conference on Northeast Asian security being held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

The person added that it was still unclear whether Abe would attend the conference in Vladivostok in September, when his ruling Liberal Democratic Party is due hold a leadership race.

TRUMP NOMINATED FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
Meanwhile, two Norwegian politicians have nominated President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize after the Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde and Per-Willy Amundsen, politicians with the populist Progress Party, told Norwegian news agency NTB on Wednesday that Trump “had taken a huge and important step in the direction of the disarmament, peace and reconciliation between North and South Korea”.

A group of US politicians also are backing Trump’s nomination for the prize.

The process of considering candidates and awarding the prize is done in Norway. Nominations must be sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee before February 1. The committee doesn’t publicly comment on who was nominated, information which is required to be kept secret for 50 years.

TRUMP FUDGES FACTS ON N KOREA
Donald Trump celebrated his historic summit with North Korea’s leader with remarks at a press conference and on Twitter that critics said were overly optimistic, twisted history and raised false hope about North Korea’s full denuclearisation.

Mr Trump tweeted that before he took office America viewed North Korea as a dangerous foe with war imminent — but not any more.

While the summit gave the two leaders an opportunity to express optimism and make a show of their new relationship, it didn’t nail down how and when the North might denuclearise, or the nature of the unspecified “protections” Mr Trump pledged to Kim and his government.

Mr Trump has insisted that strong verification of denuclearisation would be included in a final agreement that his team would sort out with the North Koreans later.

But as of now, North Korea is still believed to have a significant nuclear arsenal that could potentially threaten the US mainland. Independent experts say the North could have enough fissile material for anywhere between about a dozen and 60 nuclear bombs. Last year, it tested long-range missiles that could range the US mainland although it remains unclear if it has mastered the technology to deliver a nuclear warhead that could re-enter the atmosphere and hit its target.

Mr Trump is wrong to say there was an assumption before he took office that the United States would go to war. President Obama had used sanctions to no avail to try to halt North Korea’s nuclear program.

But it wasn’t until after Mr Trump took office that North Korea’s testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile and rhetoric between the two leaders ramped up talk of war.

Fears of conflict were particularly acute after Mr Trump dubbed Kim “Rocket Man” and Kim vowed to “tame the mentally deranged U. dotard with fire.”

Mr Trump also stated that the signed joint statement reaffirmed Kim Jong-un’s “unwavering commitment” to completely denuclearise the Korean Peninsula whereas previous administrations “never got it started and, therefore, never got it done.”

In fact, the Trump administration is not the first to initiate denuclearisation with North Korea. The Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations both did so.

Mr Clinton reached an aid-for-disarmament deal in 1994 that halted North Korea’s plutonium production for eight years, and Mr Bush took a tougher stance toward North Korea, leading to a temporary disabling of some nuclear facilities, but talks fell apart because of differences over verification.

Mr Trump also said that North Korea spent “billions of dollars and nothing happened” during the Clinton administration.

In fact, the Clinton administration and the Bush administration combined provided some $1.3 billion in assistance from 1995 to 2008, says the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress. Slightly more than half was for food aid and 40 per cent for energy assistance.

He’s also wrong in saying “nothing happened” in return. North Korea stopped producing plutonium for eight years under the 1994 agreement.

Mr Trump said about the families of missing troops from the Korean War: “They want the remains of their fathers and mothers and all of the people that got caught into that really brutal war, which took place to a large extent in North Korea. And I asked for it today. And we got it. … So, for the thousands and thousands, I guess way over 6,000 that we know of in terms of the remains, they’ll be brought back.”

In fact, of the nearly 7800 US troops unaccounted for from the war, about 5300 were lost in North Korea. Thousand are still missing in South Korea despite its close alliance and history of co-operation with the US.

Between 1996 and 2005, joint US-North Korea military search teams conducted 33 joint recovery operations and recovered 229 sets of American remains.

Mr Trump also said “I remember a nuclear event took place, 8.8 on the Richter scale, and they announced — I heard it on the radio, they announced that a massive, you know, an earthquake took place somewhere in Asia. And then they said it was in North Korea, and then they found out it was a nuclear test, I said, I never heard of a Richter scale in the high eights.”

The facts: There was no 8.8 quake registered in Asia last year. North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb in September 2017, causing an underground blast that registered as a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. An 8.8 quake would be 316 times bigger — and release 5,623 times more energy — than a 6.3.