Sides agree to meet, then North Korea fires projectile

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA » North Korea launched a projectile toward the Sea of Japan early Wednesday, just hours after announcing it had agreed to resume long-stalled talks with the United States over its nuclear weapons program.

The projectile was launched from near Wonsan, a city east of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, the South Korean military said in a statement. It gave no further details, such as the type of weapon fired or how far it flew.

The launching was the ninth time North Korea has tested ballistic missiles or other projectiles since late July, and was its first weapons test since Sept. 10, when it fired what it called two superlarge caliber rockets.

Only a day earlier, officials in North Korea and the United States said they had agreed to resume long-stalled official talks this weekend over the nuclear program — the first substantive discussions since a summit meeting failed in February.

The developments came amid warnings from President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser that the North has no intention of eliminating its nuclear weapons program.

Wednesday’s test was the first time a North Korean projectile landed in Japanese waters in nearly two years, evoking memories of a time when the public was awakened to alarms warning of potential missile landings in Japanese territory. The launch also comes as Japan and South Korea are at odds, and as the South plans to withdraw from an intelligence-sharing pact with Japan.

The announcement from Pyongyang on resumed talks with the United States, scheduled for this weekend, did not specify who from the North would attend or where the talks would be convened. Choe Son Hui, first vice foreign minister of North Korea, said her government and Washington had agreed to hold preliminary contact on Friday, to be followed by official, working-level negotiations on Saturday.

The State Department confirmed the meeting, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had hinted in recent weeks was coming soon.

“I can confirm that U.S. and DPRK officials plan to meet within the next week,” Morgan Ortagus, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters, using the abbreviation for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. She said she had no details.

The recent history of such meetings has not been promising. Trump began leader-to-leader meetings with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, precisely because decades of lower-level meetings had resulted in temporary breakthroughs at best, while the North’s nuclear and missile arsenals grew.

But 16 months after Trump and Kim reached a vague agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula — words that mean very different things in Pyongyang and Washington — the North Korean arsenal has steadily expanded, even in the absence of nuclear and intercontinental missile tests.

The talks this weekend would be the first since a summit meeting in Hanoi failed, when the United States rejected Kim’s offer to close his core nuclear site in return for the lifting of the most onerous U.S. sanctions.

Behind the scenes, American officials have struggled to come up with new proposals, including some that would take a more stepby-step approach to North Korean disarmament, rather than the rapid action that Trump said he would accomplish when he first came to office.