Seoul says North Korea is open to discussing denuclearization and improving ties with the U.S., but the rogue regime’s state media is sending an entirely different message.
“The North expressed its willingness to hold a heartfelt dialogue with the U.S. on the issues of denuclearization and normalizing relations with the United States,” the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential office, said in a statement Tuesday following a landmark meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a team of South Korean diplomats.
North Korean state media reports on the meeting made no mention of the offer to talk denuclearization.
Instead, the rogue regime argued that its nuclear weapons program is just, stressing the need to bolster the state nuclear force.
“We openly and squarely possessed nuclear weapons to defend the supreme interests of the country from the U.S. nuclear threats,” the Rodong Sinmun reported Wednesday. “Peace and security on the Korean Peninsula, Northeast Asia and the rest of the world have been reliably guaranteed by the DPRK’s bolstering of nuclear deterrent.”
“The DPRK has defended the world peace and security by single-handedly frustrating the U.S. reckless nuclear moves to stifle it by force and dominate the world.”
“Its [nuclear] feats deserve the praise of the world,” the state-run media outlet wrote, further arguing. “We have drastically weakened its unchallenged position in the world.”
The North also called attention to America’s so-called “history of nuclear crimes,” criticizing the Trump administration’s plans to advance and modernize the nuclear arsenal.
“The situation eloquently proves how just the DPRK is when it has strengthened the capabilities for self-defense in quality and quantity with the nuclear force as a pivot, under the uplifted banner of the line of simultaneously developing the economic construction and the building of nuclear force, to cope with the ever-increasing nuclear threats from the U.S.,” a different state media report asserted Wednesday.
The rhetoric is reminiscent of past arguments that the North will denuclearize when the U.S. agrees to do the same.
And, in another report, the North slammed the U.S. for its military movements around the Korean Peninsula, stressing that “the U.S. will have to face all the disasters to be caused by its reckless racket of aggression.”
In recent months, North Korea has taken a new interest in diplomacy, engaging the South in dialogue, but there is no clear evidence that North Korea will abandon the nuclear weapons it spent decades building.
“The nuclear weapons research sector and the rocket industry should mass-produce nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, the power and reliability of which have already been proved to the full, to give a spur to the efforts for deploying them for action,” Kim Jong Un said in his New Year’s address.
“Kim shows no interest in voluntarily walking away from his nuclear or missile programs, which he has made central to his security strategy,” the Defense Intelligence Agency said Tuesday in its World Threat Assessment.
“Our nuclear program is the sword of justice aimed at infinitely wiping out the United States’ blood-tainted cruel history of nuclear crimes and the formation of a nuclear devil mortal enemy,” North Korean state media asserted the same day.
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