North Korea is now saying that it won’t denuclearize until the US removes its nuclear weapons from South Korea and Japan:
REUTERS – Any deal for North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal must include “completely removing the nuclear threats of the U.S.”, North Korean state media said on Thursday, in one of the clearest explanations of how North Korea sees denuclearization.
U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un issued a statement after a historic meeting in Singapore in June reaffirming the North’s commitment to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and including U.S. guarantees of security to North Korea.
Conflicting or vague views of what exactly “denuclearization” means, however, have complicated negotiations that now appear stalled.
“When we refer to the Korean peninsula, they include both the area of the DPRK and the area of south Korea where aggression troops including the nuclear weapons of the U.S. are deployed,” the North’s state-run KCNA news agency said in a commentary, using the initials of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“When we refer to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, it, therefore, means removing all elements of nuclear threats from the areas of both the north and the south of Korea and also from surrounding areas from where the Korean peninsula is targeted.”
The United States deployed nuclear weapons in South Korea from 1958 to 1991. Since they were withdrawn, the United States has extended its “nuclear umbrella” of support to Japan and South Korea using bombers and submarines based elsewhere.
North Korea rejects American calls for it to unilaterally denuclearize, and Washington should “give up its ambition” to force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons by “high-handed practices and pressure”, the news agency said.
The United States needs to understand the phrase denuclearization of the Korean peninsula “before it is too late”, it said.
Well that’s a tall order isn’t it?
We were always skeptical of the idea that North Korea would get rid of all of its nukes, especially after 25 years of developing them. It seemed too good to be true, and well it looks like we were right.
Look I don’t fault Trump for trying. He did turn down the temperature on North Korea a lot and he got North and South Korea to engage in diplomatic talks.
But if at the end of the day their demand to denuclearize is for the US to remove its nukes from Japan and South Korea, I just don’t see that happening – at least not in that order. The only scenario I could possibly see is that North Korea completely denuclearize, allowing open inspections of the entire country, and then maybe the US would remove its nukes after all is said and done. But that would require a huge amount of trust on North Korea’s part and I just don’t see that happening.