JOHN REY O. SAAVEDRA NoKor threatens to cancel summit with the US if…
SEOUL — North Korea threatened yesterday to cancel the forthcoming summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump if Washington seeks to push Pyongyang into unilaterally giving up its nuclear arsenal.
It also cancelled high-level talks due Wednesday with Seoul over the Max Thunder joint military exercises being held between the United States and South Korea, denouncing the drills as a "rude and wicked provocation."
It is a sudden and dramatic return to the rhetoric of the past by Pyongyang, after months of rapid diplomatic rapprochement on the peninsula.
"If the US is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue," first vice foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan said in a statement carried by state media.
In that case, he added, Pyongyang would have to "reconsider" its participation at the summit, due in Singapore on June 12.
The North's arsenal is expected to be at the top of the agenda of the historic talks, but Pyongyang has long insisted it needs the weapons to defend itself against invasion by the US.
Washington is pressing for its complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. But so far the North has not given any public indication of what concessions it is offering, beyond euphemistic commitments to denuclearization of the "Korean peninsula."
Pyongyang had "made clear on several occasions that precondition for denuclearization is to put an end to anti-DPRK hostile policy and nuclear threats and blackmail of the United States," minister Kim said.
In the past, Pyongyang has demanded the withdrawal of the US troops stationed in the South to protect it from its neighbor, and an end to Washington's nuclear umbrella over its security ally.
The minister also blasted US National Security Advisor John Bolton's talk of a "Libyan model" for North Korean denuclearization.
It was a "sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq," he said. "I cannot suppress indignation at such moves of the US, and harbor doubt about the US sincerity."
The North has long said it needs nuclear weapons to protect itself against a US invasion. After giving up his atomic program, Libyan leader Moamer Khadafi was killed in an uprising backed by NATO bombing.
Minister Kim also dismissed offers by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – who has visited Pyongyang twice in recent weeks, coming back the second time with three released US detainees – for US economic aid if the North denuclearises.
"We have never had any expectation of US support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future," Kim said.