North Korea on Thursday followed through on a pledge to blow up tunnels used for nuclear testing, South Korean media reported.
It is part of steps that would reduce tension on the Korean peninsula and raise the possibility of a summit with the U.S.
North Korea has conducted all six of its nuclear tests at the Punggye-ri site, which consists of tunnels dug beneath Mount Mantap in the northeast of the country.
Earlier, North Korea said Saturday that it would destroy its nuclear test site later this month, ahead of a summit with the U.S., pledging to blow up its tunnels in front of invited foreign media.
U.S. President Donald Trump praised the North’s decision to dismantle the Punggye-ri test site in a ceremony scheduled between May 23-25, the latest step in leader Kim Jong Un’s charm offensive.
“Thank you; a very smart and gracious gesture!” Trump tweeted.
Dialogue brokered by Seoul has seen U.S.-North Korea relations gone from trading personal insults and threats of war in 2017 to a summit between North Korea President, Kim Jong-Un and Trump due in Singapore on June 12.
But skeptics warn that Pyongyang has yet to make any public commitment to give up its arsenal, which include missiles capable of reaching the U.S.
Washington is seeking the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation’’ of the North and stresses that verification will be key.
Punggye-ri, in the northeast of the country, has hosted all six of the North’s nuclear tests, the latest and by far the most powerful in September 2017, which Pyongyang said was an H-bomb.
Jong-Un has declared the development of the North’s nuclear force complete and that it had no further need for the site.
The latest measures will see the tunnels of the test site blown up and their entrances completely blocked, Pyongyang’s foreign ministry said, according to the official KCNA news agency.
All observation facilities and research institutes would be removed, along with guards, it said, “and the surrounding area of the test ground be completely closed”.
Reporters from China, Russia, the U.S., Britain and South Korea would be allowed to cover the event on site to show it “in a transparent manner”.
Limits on foreign journalists were due to space constraints, it said, as the site was in an “uninhabited deep mountain area”.
South Korea welcomed the announcement, which signalled the North’s willingness to carry out its pledges “not just in words but in action”.
“We hope the sound of the dynamite blowing up the tunnels at Punggye-ri will be the first salute in our journey towards a nuclear-free Korean peninsula,” the South’s presidential spokesman said.
Analysts said the move was positive but limited in its scope.
It was “not bad, but a cost-free signal’’, tweeted MIT political science prof. Vipin Narang.
Given the stage it had already reached, Pyongyang “may feel like they don’t need to test anything for a while,” he said.
Jeffrey Lewis, of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, expected that the North “will sanitise the site before letting anyone see it”.
Saturday’s announcement is the latest move in a rapid sequence of events on the Korean peninsula triggered by the Winter Olympics in the South.
Tensions had been mounting for years as Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes saw it subjected to multiple rounds of increasingly strict sanctions by the UN Security Council, the U.S., EU, South Korea and others.
Trump in 2017 threatened the North with “fire and fury”.
But since the Pyeongchang Games, Pyongyang and Washington have agreed to the unprecedented Singapore meeting, and Jong-Un has twice visited China to meet President XiJinping, after not paying respects in the six years since he inherited power from his father.
The head of the UN’s World Food Programme said May 19 it appeared North Korea was “turning a new page in history”, following a four-day visit to the country.
David Beasley said he had enjoyed unprecedented access to the secretive state, telling BBC radio that North Korea’s leaders had a “sense of optimism”.
Jong-Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in May affirmed their commitment to the goal of “realising, through complete denuclearisation, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula” at a summit in the Demilitarised Zone that divides their countries.
But the phrase is a diplomatic euphemism open to interpretation on both sides.
Pyongyang has long wanted to see an end to the U.S. military presence in and nuclear umbrella over the South, but it invaded its neighbour in 1950 and is the only one of the two Koreas to possess nuclear weapons.
Recently, the North released three Korean-Americans it had detained into the care of U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who was making his second trip to Pyongyang in two months.
However, Trump also withdrew the U.S. from a nuclear pact with Iran, raising questions over whether Pyongyang would trust Washington’s promises.
Pompeo on May 18 promised the U.S. would work to rebuild North Korea’s sanctions-hit economy if it agreed to surrender its nuclear arsenal. (Reuters/NAN)
https://www.africaprimenews.com/2018/05/23/news/trump-says-meeting-with-kim-may-not-work-out/
