North Korea has already begun its denuclearization, US President Donald Trump said on Thursday, after many observers greeted with scepticism the results of his historic meeting with the North’s leader Kim Jong Un.
Mr Trump said at a Cabinet meeting in the White House that “they’ve stopped the sending of missiles, including ballistic missiles. They’re destroying their engine site. They’re blowing it up. They’ve already blown up one of their big test sites, in fact, it’s actually four of their big test sites”.
In late May, before the June 12 Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, Pyongyang said it had fully demolished its only known nuclear test site. Foreign journalists who invited to the Pungyye-ri test facility in North Hamgyong province described a series of explosions throughout the day in their reports; three of them in entry tunnels, followed by blasts that demolished nearby barracks and other structures.
It was not immediately clear which North Korean test sites Mr Trump was referring to and US officials familiar with current intelligence on North Korea’s nuclear and missile test sites said there was no evidence of new moves to dismantle any sites since Mr Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12 in Singapore.
Punggye-ri has been the staging ground for all six of the North’s nuclear tests, including the latest and by far most powerful one in September last year which Pyongyang said was an H-bomb. Experts are divided over whether the demolition will render the site inoperable. Sceptics say the facility has already outlived its usefulness with six successful nuclear tests and can be quickly rebuilt if needed.
Mr Trump, who has been leading an international drive to press North Korea to abandon development of nuclear missiles capable of reaching the United States, told reporters after the June 12 summit that Mr Kim had pledged to dismantle one of his missile installations.
At their summit, Kim and Trump signed a pledge “to work towards complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” a stock phrase favoured by Pyongyang that stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a “verifiable” and “irreversible” way.
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