Date set for destroying DPRK test site
THE Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will destroy its nuclear test site this month, ahead of a summit with the United States.
The DPRK made the announcement on Saturday, pledging to blow up its tunnels in front of invited foreign media.
US President Donald Trump praised the DPRK’s decision to dismantle the Punggye-ri test site in a ceremony scheduled for sometime from May 23 to 25.
“North Korea has announced that they will dismantle Nuclear Test Site this month, ahead of the big Summit Meeting on June 12,” he tweeted. “Thank you, a very smart and gracious gesture!”
US-DPRK relations have gone from trading personal insults and threats of war last year to a summit between Kim Jong Un and Trump due in Singapore on June 12, which will be the first meeting between a DPRK leader and a sitting US president.
Punggye-ri, in the northeast of the country, has hosted all six of the DPRK’s nuclear tests, the latest and by far the most powerful last September, which Pyongyang said was an H-bomb.
The latest measures will see the tunnels of the test site blown up and their entrances blocked, DPRK’s foreign ministry said, according to the official Korean Central New Agency.
All observation facilities and research institutes would be removed, along with guards, it said, “and the surrounding area of the test ground be completely closed.”
The exact date of the closure will depend on weather conditions, the agency added.
“The Nuclear Weapon Institute and other concerned institutions are taking technical measures for dismantling the northern nuclear test ground ... in order to ensure transparency of discontinuance of the nuclear test,” KCNA said.
Reporters from China, Russia, the US, Britain and South Korea would be allowed to cover the event on site to show it “in a transparent manner.”
Limits on foreign journalists were due to space constraints, it said, as the site was in an “uninhabited deep mountain area.”
To accommodate the traveling journalists, DPRK’s official new agency said various measures would be taken including “opening territorial airspace.”
South Korea welcomed the announcement, which signaled the DPRK’s willingness to carry out its pledges “not just in words but in action.”
“We hope the sound of the dynamite blowing up the tunnels at Punggye-ri will be the first salute in our journey toward a nuclearfree Korean Peninsula,” South Korea’s presidential spokesman said yesterday.
Last month, South Korean President Moon Jae-in had asked the United Nations to help verify the shutdown.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said its deputy nuclear envoy Jeong Yeon-doo will visit the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna this week to discuss the “complete denuclearization of North Korea.”
Saturday’s announcement is the latest move in a rapid sequence of events on the Korean Peninsula triggered by the Winter Olympics in South Korea.
Tensions had been mounting for years as Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs saw it subjected to multiple rounds of increasingly strict sanctions by the UN Security Council, the US, the European Union, South Korea and others.
But since the Pyeongchang Games, Pyongyang and Washington have agreed to the unprecedented Singapore meeting, and Kim has twice visited China to meet President Xi Jinping.
The head of the UN’s World Food Programme said on Saturday that it appeared the DPRK was “turning a new page in history,” following a four-day visit to the country.
David Beasley said he had enjoyed unprecedented access to the secretive state, telling BBC radio that the DPRK’s leaders had a “sense of optimism.”
Kim and Moon last month affirmed their commitment to the goal of “realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula” at a summit in the Demilitarized Zone that divides their countries.
Last week, the DPRK released three Korean-Americans it had detained into the care of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was making his second trip to Pyongyang in two months.