Pyongyang prepares nuke site demolition
Summit with US in doubt
SEOUL, May 23, (Agencies): Invited foreign journalists began a long journey up North Korea’s east coast Wednesday to witness the slated destruction of the reclusive regime’s nuclear test site, a high profile gesture on the road to a summit with the US that Donald Trump now says might not happen.
In a surprise announcement Pyongyang said earlier this month that it planned to “completely” destroy the Punggye-ri facility in the country’s northeast, a move welcomed by Washington and Seoul.
Punggye-ri has been the staging ground for all six of the North’s nuclear tests, including its latest and by far most powerful one in September last year, which Pyongyang said was an H-bomb.
The demolition is due to take place sometime between Thursday and Friday, depending on the weather. The North has portrayed the move as a goodwill gesture ahead of a planned June 12 summit between Kim and Trump in Singapore.
But doubts have since been cast by both sides on whether that historic meeting will take place.
Last week Pyongyang threatened to pull out if Washington pressed for its unilateral nuclear disarmament. Trump also said the meeting could be delayed as he met with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in in Washington on Tuesday.
“There are certain conditions we want to happen. I think we’ll get those conditions. And if we don’t, we won’t have the meeting,” he told reporters, without elaborating on what those conditions might be.
Politically, Trump has invested heavily in the success of the planned summit, and so privately most US officials, as well as outside observers, believe it will go ahead.
But as the date draws near, the differences between the two sides are coming into sharp relief.
Washington has made it clear it wants to see the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation” of the North.
Pyongyang has vowed it will never give up its nuclear deterrence until it feels safe from what it terms US aggression.
Observers will be watching this week’s demolition ceremony closely for any clues to the North’s intentions.
Trump
Experts
Experts are divided over whether the demolition will render the site useless. Sceptics say the site has already outlived its usefulness with six successful nuclear tests in the bag and can be quickly rebuilt if needed.
Previous similar gestures by the North were rapidly reversed when the international mood soured.
But others say the fact that North Korea agreed to destroy the site without preconditions or asking for something in return from Washington suggests Pyongyang’s sincerity.
Go Myong-hyun, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, said both sides were playing “a game of chicken” in the run-up to the summit “to gain an upper hand in negotiations”.
He said the destruction of the site would win Pyongyang international sympathy even if the summit collapses.
“North Korea can say to the international community that it did its best to achieve denuclearisation through negotiations but was pressured by the United States and couldn’t do it,” he said.
In related news, a group of foreign journalists departed by train Wednesday to watch the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear test site after eight reporters from South Korea received last-minute permission to join them. The remote site deep in the mountains of the North’s sparsely populated northeast interior is expected to have a formal closing ceremony in the next day or two, depending on the weather. The closing was announced by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of his planned summit with U.S. President Donald Trump next month.
The train trip was expected to take 8-12 hours, followed by several hours on a bus and then an hour hike to the site itself.
The journalists were put in sleeping cars on the train, four bunks to a compartment. The compartments had windows covered with blinds, and the journalists were told not to open the blinds during the journey.
Media were also expected to pay their own costs for the trip. The train fare was $75 per person round trip. Each meal was $20.
Grant
North Korea had earlier refused to grant entry visas to the South Korean journalists after the North cut off high-level contact with Seoul to protest joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. But North Korea accepted the list of the South Korean journalists to attend via a cross-border communication channel.
The journalists from the MBC television network and News1 wire service took a special government flight later Wednesday to go to the North’s northeastern coastal city of Wonsan. The other journalists from the United States, the UK, China and Russia arrived in Wonsan on Tuesday.
The group includes an Associated Press Television crew. The North’s eleventh-hour decision to allow the South Koreans to join came just after Trump met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Washington to try to keep the Kim-Trump summit from going off the rails. Trump indicated he believes the meeting will take place, but left open the possibility it would be delayed or even cancelled if a fruitful outcome doesn’t seem likely.
The summit could offer a historic chance for peace on the Korean Peninsula.
But there has been increasing pessimism about the meeting after North Korea scrapped the inter-Korean talks and threatened to do the same for the KimTrump summit in protest of the South Korea-U.S. military drills and what it calls Washington’s push for “one-sided” disarmament.
The North’s decision to close the Punggye-ri nuclear test site has generally been seen as a welcome gesture by Kim to set a positive tone ahead of the summit. Even so, it is not an irreversible move and would need to be followed by many more significant measures to meet Trump’s demands for real denuclearization.
By bringing in the foreign media, mainly television networks, the North is apparently hoping to have images of the closing — including explosions to collapse tunnel entrances — broadcast around the world. But it has not invited international inspectors to the ceremony, which limits its value as a serious concession.