Seoul: American experts will be invited to site, Kim said Trump will learn he’s ‘not a person’ to fire missiles toward US
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said during Friday’s summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he would close the country’s nuclear test site next month, Moon’s office said Sunday.
“Kim said during the summit… that he would carry out the closing of the nuclear test site in May,” Moon’s spokesman Yoon Young-chan told reporters.
Kim promised to invite US experts and journalists to watch the closure of the test site “to disclose the process to the international community with transparency,” the spokesman said.
Yoon said Kim also said United States President Donald Trump will learn he’s “not a person” to fire missiles toward the US. The Kim-Trump meeting is anticipated in May or June.
Yoon said North Korea also plans to re-adjust its current time zone to match the South’s. The North in 2015 created its own “Pyongyang Time” by setting the clock 30 minutes behind the South.
On Saturday, Trump said he will be meeting with Kim in the coming weeks, adding that he would be prepared to leave in the middle of the meeting if it won’t “work out.”
Trump and his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, spoke on Saturday with their South Korean counterparts after the historic meeting between leaders of the two Koreas, and Trump said “things are going very well” as he prepares for his expected summit with Kim.
“I think we will have a meeting over the next three or four weeks that will be a very important meeting… but we’ll see how it goes,” he said at a campaign-style rally in the town of Washington, Michigan
“And again, whatever happens, happens. Look, I may go in. It may not work out. I leave,” he continued. “We’re going to have hopefully a very successful negotiation over the next three or four weeks. And we’ll be doing the world a big favor. We’ll be doing the world a big favor.”
Mattis and South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo said they were committed to “a diplomatic resolution that achieves complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the North, according to the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman, Dana W. White. Mattis also reaffirmed “the ironclad US commitment” to defend its ally “using the full spectrum of US capabilities. ”
Trump tweeted that he had “a long and very good talk” with President Moon. He also said he updated Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, about “the ongoing negotiations” for his anticipated summit with Kim.
Moon and Kim have pledged to seek a formal end to the Korean War, fought from 1950 to 1953, by year’s end and to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons. Trump has said he’s looking forward to the meeting with Kim and that it “should be quite something.”
A statement from the White House describing the call between Trump and Moon also referred to the North’s future being contingent upon “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.”
As reported by The Times of Israel