NK nuclear talks ‘may be doomed’
The United States and North Korea gave starkly contrasting reports yesterday after two days of talks intended to firm up Pyongyang’s promise to dismantle its nuclear weapons systems.
The different descriptions of the meeting raised fears that disarmament negotiations may be doomed before they really begin.
While Secretary of State Michael Pompeo claimed limited ‘‘progress’’ in ‘‘productive’’ meetings, North Korea expressed ‘‘regret’’ over the talks and accused the Trump administration of making unfair ‘‘unilateral’’ demands.
Within hours of Pompeo’s departure early Saturday from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, its foreign ministry issued a statement saying US demands might lead to ‘‘a dangerous phase that might rattle our willingness for denuclearisation that had been firm’’. Pompeo offered no details of his talks with North Korea’s former spy chief Kim Yong Chol, nor did he outline any tangible gains.
He flew to Tokyo without meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in contrast to his two previous trips to Pyongyang in the past three months.
The meetings in Pyongyang were the first follow-up to the June 12 summit in Singapore, when President Donald Trump and Kim signed a brief, vague agreement to ‘‘work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.’’
The agreement left all details to future talks.
This first session demonstrated how complicated and arduous the negotiations will be to persuade Kim to abandon the nuclear programme he and his father and grandfather spent decades building.
The Singapore communique also said the two governments would revive a programme of repatriating the remains of US military personnel killed in the Korean War of the 1950s. North Korea has yet to comply with that step.
Pompeo said Pentagon officials would meet with North Korean counterparts on Thursday, probably along the demilitarised border that separates North and South Korea, to discuss repatriations.
On more than one occasion, though, Trump has claimed that the remains already had been repatriated, as the Huffington first reported.
‘‘We got back our great fallen heroes, the remains. In fact today, already 200 have been sent back,’’ Trump said during a rally in Duluth on June 20.
He repeated that claim in subsequent rallies in Las Vegas and West Columbia. ‘‘And you probably read, they have already done 200 people, which is so great,’’ he said at the Las Vegas rally.LA Times