Experts to witness nuclear closure
Kim promises US specialist, journalists will be invited to N Korea
NORTH Korean leader Kim Jongun plans to invite experts and journalists from the US and South Korea when the country closes its nuclear test site next month, Seoul officials said yesterday, as US President Donald Trump pressed for total denuclearisation ahead of his own unprecedented meeting with Kim.
On Friday, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in vowed complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula in the first inter-Korean summit in more than a decade, but the declaration did not include concrete steps to reach that goal.
North Korea’s state media had said before the summit that Pyongyang would immediately suspend nuclear and missile tests, scrap its nuclear test site and instead pursue economic growth and peace.
Kim told Moon he would soon invite the experts and journalists to open to the international community the dismantling of the facilities, the Blue House said.
“The United States, though inherently hostile to North Korea, will get to know once our talk begins that I am not the kind of person who will use nuclear weapons against the South or the United States across the Pacific,” Moon’s press secretary Yoon Youngchan quoted Kim as saying.
“There is no reason for us to possess nuclear weapons while suffering difficulties if mutual trust with the United States is built through frequent meetings from now on, and an end to the war and non-aggression are promised.”
Kim said there were two additional, larger tunnels that remained in a very good condition at the Punggye-ri test site beyond the existing one, which experts have said had collapsed after repeated explosions, rendering much of the site useless.
Kim’s promise showed his willingness to preemptively and actively respond to inspection efforts to be made as part of the denuclearisation process, Yoon said.
Kim also reaffirmed that he would not use military force against the South and raised the need for an institutional mechanism to prevent unintended escalations, Yoon said.
Trump told Moon in a phone call on Saturday that he was pleased the leaders of the two Koreas had reaffirmed the goal of complete denuclearisation, Seoul officials said.
Moon and Trump agreed on the need for an early summit between Trump and Kim. A senior US official has said Singapore is being considered as a possible neutral venue.
“Trump said it was good news for not only the two Koreas but the whole world that they affirmed the goal of realising a nuclear-free Korean peninsula through a complete denuclearisation,” Blue House spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom told a separate briefing.
Trump, who called the 75-minute chat a long and very good talk on Twitter, said his summit with Kim would take place some time in the next three to four weeks.
“It’s going be a very important meeting, the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula,” he said at a campaign rally in Michigan on Saturday.
The White House said Trump and Moon had during the call “emphasised that a peaceful and prosperous future for North Korea is contingent upon its complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearisation”.
But most of the specific commitments outlined in the official declaration signed by Kim and Moon focused on inter-Korean relations and did not clear up the question of whether Pyongyang was willing to give up its arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. – Reuters