North Korea threatens to cancel US summit over military drills
HOPES of quashing North Korea’s nuclear program might be stymied after an announcement by the country’s national broadcaster.
Reuters reported the rogue state’s Korean Central News Agency announced the north will not engage in economic trade with the US in exchange for its denuclearisation.
KCNA also launched a scathing attack on US President Donald Trump, saying he would be a failed leader if he followed a similar path to previous presidents, according to Reuters.
North Korea threatened Wednesday to cancel the forthcoming summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump if Washington presses ahead with its key demand for Pyongyang to unilaterally give up its nuclear arsenal.
If the Trump administration “corners us and unilaterally demands we give up nuclear weapons we will no longer have an interest in talks and will have to reconsider whether we will accept the upcoming DPRK-US summit”, first vice foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.
“The US is talking about giving us economic rewards and benefits when we give up nuclear weapons. We have never built economies expecting things from the US and will never do such a deal in the future,” Mr Kye-gwan said
DEFECTOR WARNS “VIOLENT” KIM WILL NOT GIVE UP NUKES
North Korean despot Kim Jong Un is “hot-tempered and violent” and will never give up his nukes — despite what he says ahead of his landmark summit with President Trump, a top defector has claimed.
“In the end, North Korea will remain ‘a nuclear power packaged as a non-nuclear state,’” said Thae Yong Ho, the hermit kingdom’s former deputy ambassador to the UK, Agence France-Presse reported.
The New York Post reports that Thae — who fled with his family to South Korea in 2016 — made his explosive comments during a press conference in which he unveiled his autobiography, The Secret Code of the 3rd Floor Room.
“It is too early to predict (with one month left before the summit), but I think the North will move toward sufficient, verifiable, irreversible dismantling, which is to sufficiently reduce threats from nuclear weapons, rather than seek complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement (CVID),” he told reporters.
“The final destination that the North is headed for is not to completely dismantle its nuclear weapons program but become a nuclear weapons state covered by the paper called denuclearisation,” he added, according to the South’s Yonhap news agency.
The historic summit between Trump and Kim is planned for June 12 in Singapore, where the two leaders are expected to discuss the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
During an April 27 meeting, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in affirmed the goal of a “complete” denuclearisation. Pyongyang later announced it would destroy its only known nuclear test site.
But the rogue regime has not made public what concessions it is offering — and the South’s JoongAng Ilbo daily noted it had only invited reporters to witness the operation at the Punggye-ri site.
“It is regrettable that North Korea did not invite nuclear experts to the destruction of the test site,” it said in an editorial.
“If North Korea has really decided to denuclearise, it has no reason not to invite them.”
Thae questioned whether a complete denuclearisation could take place in a country with an “omnipotent” and “godlike” leader in power.
“Kim Jong-un said during a party meeting on April 20 that (nuclear weapons) are a treasured sword for protecting peace. He also said that they are the strongest assurance that guarantees the most respected and happiest life on Earth,” he said, Yonhap reported.
“They are, in other words, a sword and a shield for eternal prosperity, prosperity and happiness for generations to come … He will never give them up.”
NORTH KOREA’S WARNING ON SUMMIT WITH U.S.
Those comments came as North Korea has cancelled a high-level summit with South Korea and threatened to ditch its much anticipated meeting with the United States as well.
Kim Jong-un and South Korea were supposed to hold talks in the demilitarised zone today.
But joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States have angered the North, Yonhap says, citing North Korea’s state media outlet KCNA.
KCNA claimed that the military drills were a rehearsal for a potential invasion of the country.
“There is a limit to the amount of good will and chances we can give,” the North’s official news agency KCNA said.
The US will “have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-US summit in light of this provocative military ruckus”, it said.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it had received “no notification” of a position change by North Korea.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is still hopeful North Korea will come to the negotiating table but has warned the rogue nation has backed away from promises before.
“The important thing is that the parties continue to talk," Mr Turnbull told reporters in Tasmania.
He praised US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping for backing tough economic sanctions on North Korea, saying they were the reason Pyongyang had come to the table to negotiate.
"We look forward to those discussions progressing. But we have to say that while we welcome them, we've always got to say we welcome them with caution," Mr Turnbull said.
"There have been a lot of false dawns before but so far we appear to be making some progress.
"Let's hope we're not disappointed like we have so many times in the past."
The language used by KCNA is a sudden and dramatic return to the rhetoric of the past from Pyongyang, which has long argued that it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself against the US.
Hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War stopped with a ceasefire, leaving the two halves of the peninsula divided by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and still technically at war.
At a dramatic summit last month in Panmunjom, the truce village in the DMZ, Kim and the South’s President Moon Jae-in pledged to pursue a peace treaty to formally end the conflict, and reaffirmed their commitment to denuclearising the Korean peninsula.
But the phrase is open to interpretation on both sides and the North has spent decades developing its atomic arsenal, culminating last year in its sixth nuclear test — by far its biggest to date — and the launch of missiles capable of reaching the US.
NORTH KOREA TO JOIN ANTI-NUCLEAR EFFORT
It came as North Korea planned to join international efforts to implement a total ban on nuclear weapons tests, an ambassador for the country told the United Nations disarmament body overnight.
“DPRK will join international desires and efforts for a total ban on nuclear tests,” North Korea’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva Han Tae-song said in an address to the Conference on Disarmament, using North Korea’s official acronym.
Kim last month announced that his country would halt its own nuclear tests and intercontinental missile launches, which was widely hailed as an important step towards denuclearising the Korean peninsula.
But Pyongyang has yet to rejoin the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it withdrew from in 2003.
It is also one of eight countries with nuclear test capacity, including the United States, China and Iran, which have so far failed to either sign or ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, blocking it from taking effect.
Han, who made no reference to the treaties, told the UN assembly that his country aimed to make more “efforts to achieve the development of intra-Korean relations, defuse acute military tensions and substantially remove the danger of the war on the Korean peninsula”.
“It will make sincere efforts ... to establish a durable lasting peace mechanism” with its neighbour to the south, he said, urging the international community to “extend its active support in encouraging and promoting the current positive climate.”
Asked about the continued threats of sanctions from Washington, Han warned overnight that they were “a dangerous attempt to ruin the hard-won atmosphere of dialogue”.
