Tag: Disarmament

Mike Pompeo has said the US will use a summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un to demand North Korea completely and rapidly surrenders its nuclear weapons programme before it receives any economic relief. Pompeo added he was “very hopeful” the summit would still go ahead on 12 June. The US secretary of state was speaking in Congress a day after Trump had cast doubt on the timing of the summit in Singapore, and appeared to drop the insistence of “all-in-one” unilateral disarmament before receiving any reciprocal steps from the US. Last week, a senior North Korean official said that position was not acceptable to Pyongyang, raising doubts over whether the summit would happen. “We are not going to do trade for trade. We are not going to let this drag out. We are not going to provide economic relief until some time as we have an irreversible set of actions – not words, not commitments – undertaken by the North Korean regime.” The previous day, during a White House meeting with the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, Trump appeared to signal flexibility over this negotiating position in which North Korea would dismantle its programme, and surrender its nuclear warheads, fissile material and production facilities, before any reciprocal measures from the US. “It would certainly be better if it were all-in-one,” Trump said. “When I spoke with him I could not have been clearer about the scope of the verification work that would be required, all of the elements that would be necessary for America to understand there had been real denuclearisation.” In the fullest account to date of the Pompeo-Kim talks, the secretary of state recounted the North Korean leader’s demands. “He made clear it was important to him that when that time came those objectives had been achieved, that he would receive economic help in the form of private sector businesses, knowledge, knowhow, from others perhaps, contributions, foreign assistance and the like, and he wanted security assurances from the world, the end of the status that sits between North and South Korea with the eventual goal of a peace treaty,” Pompeo said.