WASHINGTON — North Korea officially declared an end Friday to its diplomatic dalliance with the U.S. But experts say it’s been clear for some time that President Donald Trump’s bold but risky effort to sweet talk Kim Jong Un into relinquishing his nuclear weapons never really went anywhere. Two high-profile meetings with North Korea’s leader bought Trump a hiatus from bellicose rhetoric and nuclear tests, but Kim never stopped building nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, U.S. intelligence officials and private analysts say. Now, on the second anniversary of that first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, North Korea is renouncing the diplomacy while promising to expand its weapons program, even as experts say it is ever closer to perfecting a long-range missile capable of reaching and destroying an American city. Trump therefore joins a long list of presidents who tried and failed to cut a deal to get rid of North Korean nuclear weapons — but the first one who met face to face with the leader of the outlaw regime, lending it a measure of legitimacy. Trump at one point mused that he and Kim “fell in love,” and he showered praise on a dictator who is said by human rights groups to keep tens of thousands of political prisoners in vast gulags. Trump made a series of other concessions, including the unilateral cancellation of joint U.S. and South Korean missile exercises. He got very little in return. “In terms of the so-called goals of the summit, we made no progress in any of those things,” said Victor Cha, a former White House adviser to President George W. Bush and now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an NBC News contributor. “And this was arguably the one piece of diplomacy into which Trump put all of his personal capital.” If America benefited at all from the outreach, Cha said, “it probably prevented Trump from stumbling into a war with North Korea.” Before the diplomacy, North Korea successfully tested a missile in September 2017 that experts said could deliver a nuclear warhead to the U.S. mainland. A few weeks later, Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In March 2018, Kim sent Trump a message asking to meet, and Trump agreed. What emerged from the Singapore summit was a vague agreement to work toward “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” That phrase was not defined, and experts pointed out that the language was less explicit than a deal Kim’s father, Kim Jong-Il, agreed to in 2005 — and subsequently violated. After the summit, Trump famously proclaimed on Twitter that Americans can “sleep well at night” knowing that North Korea was prepared to give up its nuclear weapons and that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea." “None of that was true,” said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst and North Korea watcher at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. “And what we’ve seen since then from leaked intelligence assessments and commercial satellite imagery is that they’ve expanded and improved production facilities for fissile material, missile production, mobile re-entry vehicles and launch vehicles. And they’ve probably built eight or more additional nuclear weapons.” Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. North Korea began souring on the negotiations last year after a second Kim-Trump summit in February ended without agreement and sanctions relief did not materialize. In December 2019, the North ominously promised a “Christmas gift” for the U.S. That threat did not appear to have been carried out, and earlier this year Kim disappeared from view for weeks amid speculation about his health. Kim resurfaced last month, and on Friday, his government made clear that any agreement with Trump was now null and void. “Even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare,” the country’s foreign minister, Ri Son-Gwon, said in a statement marking the second anniversary of the Singapore summit. He called the talks “nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep [North Korea] bound to dialogue and use it in favor of the political situation and election in the U.S.,” adding, “Never again will we provide the U.S. chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns. Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise.” North Korea’s strategic goal is “to build up a more reliable force to cope with the long-term military threats from the U.S.” Ri said. Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, found the reference to the American election telling. “They were never offering to disarm,” he said. “What they were offering to do was to give Trump good news stories for his political campaign, in exchange for sanctions relief.” They didn’t get the sanctions relief, but what they did get was a friendlier Trump administration. The president stopped talking about North Korean human rights abuses. When House Republicans recommended sanctioning 12 Chinese banks allegedly involved in sanctions busting and money laundering for North Korea, Trump sanctioned none of them. And the Trump administration cancelled joint military exercises on the Korean peninsula even as North Korean military exercises continued apace. Meanwhile, Trump pressed South Korea to pay more to support the U.S. troop presence on its soil. “It didn’t improve relations with South Korea and it didn’t lead to any reciprocal actions by North Korea,” Klingner said. China, Russia and South Korea also “took their foot off the pedal,” in terms of enforcing sanctions to pressure the regime, Cha said. North Korea did send home the remains of 55 U.S. service members, but 619 sets of remains have been sent back in previous administrations, Klingner said. The North freed five detainees, compared to 11 during the Obama administration. One of them was Otto Warmbier, who returned in a vegetative state and soon died. Even the suspension of nuclear and long-range missile testing is less than meets the eye, Klingner said. “We’ve had several instances of three or more years of no testing under Bush and Obama,” he said. It’s not that Trump wasn’t warned. Even as he was declaring victory, intelligence officials were telling NBC News that North Korea had not halted work on its nuclear program. Even in public, intelligence chiefs acknowledged that North Korea was extremely unlikely to give up its weapons because it considers them necessary for regime survival. That glaring contradiction was among the reasons Congress was unable to hold a public Worldwide Threats hearing, an annual briefing, this year. Intelligence officials didn’t want to have to once again dispute the president in public. Still, some experts gave Trump credit for trying a different approach. “I supported his outreach to Kim Jong Un in North Korea,” former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates, who served under both Bushes and Obama, told NPR Friday. “Everything else we've tried for the preceding quarter of a century had not worked.” Cha agrees. But now that top-down summitry also failed, “I think it makes it harder for the next president, because the most important bargaining chip has already been played, and they have more weapons now so, they are less inclined to give them up.” “Meeting with a U.S. president — it’s not that big a deal for them any more.” Now that the deal has collapsed, Cha, Lewis, Klingner and other experts expect North Korea to do something provocative in the fall, in an effort to punish Trump during the political campaign. “Perhaps an October surprise,” Klingner said.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-...eapons-Swedish-think-tank-says/6981592226924/ North Korea could have 40 nuclear weapons, Swedish think tank says June 15 (UPI) -- North Korea has in its possession 30 to 40 nuclear weapons, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says. SIPRI's Yearbook 2020, an annual report released Monday, states North Korea added 10 nuclear weapons through January 2020. In 2019, the leading conflict and armaments think tank had estimated North Korea retained anywhere from 20 to 30 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. SIPRI did not include information on North Korea nuclear weapons capabilities. According to Yonhap, the estimated number of North Korean nuclear warheads is not included in SIPRI'S global total. The estimate of North Korea's weapons represents a small portion of all nuclear arms globally. According to SIPRI, an estimated total of 13,400 nuclear weapons could be found around the world as of January. The United States and Russia possess at least 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons, the report says. RELATED North Korea building up nuclear arsenal, researchers say North Korea continues to prioritize its nuclear program as the core of its national security strategy, according to SIPRI. The think tank said North Korea followed through with its pledge to suspend nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile launches, but may have resumed several short-range ballistic missile tests through January. The report also said there are nine nuclear weapons states -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. The total weapons count is down from 2019. "This marked a decrease from the 13,865 nuclear weapons that SIPRI estimated these states possessed at the beginning of 2019. Around 3,720 of the nuclear weapons are currently deployed with operational forces and nearly 1,800 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert," SIPRI said. RELATED Breakthrough needed on North Korea, South's leader says North Korea has shown signs it may be willing to return to a cycle of armed provocations. Senior North Korean official Kim Yo Jong has threatened to turn the inter-Korea liaison office into a "tragic scene." Analysts in the South are speculating whether the North intends to detonate the building in Kaesong, North Korea, according to News 1 on Monday.
South Korea convened an emergency security meeting Sunday after the sister of North Korea's leader threatened military action against South Korea in the latest escalation of tensions between the two neighbors. Kim Yo Jong, a trusted aide to her brother, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, said she would leave the right to take the next step of retaliation against South Korea to North Korea's military in a statement carried Saturday by the state news agency, KCNA. Kim, who has gained new prominence in North Korea's power structure, didn't specify what the next action could be or when exactly it would be taken, but she added: "I feel it is high time to surely break with the South Korean authorities. We will soon take the next action." A spokesman for the Blue House, South Korea's presidential office, said Sunday that the national security council held an emergency video conference to review the situation and to discuss how best to respond. The Unification Ministry, which handles relations with North Korea, said in a statement that the Koreas must do their best to abide by all inter-Korean agreements. South Korea's Defense Ministry said separately that it was seriously assessing the situation and carefully monitoring North Korean movements. "South Korean military is maintaining resolute military readiness to respond to all situations," the ministry's statement said. Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings. Kim's statement Saturday followed her announcement last week that North Korea was suspending all communication lines with South Korea, a move analysts believe could be an attempt to manufacture a crisis and force concessions from its neighbor. North Korea said it was angered by defectors who have fled to the South and the routine flying of balloons over the border carrying propaganda leaflets. South Korea responded by saying it would take legal action against two organizations that conduct such operations. Kim Jin Ah, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government research center in Seoul, said North Korea is using propaganda leaflets as an excuse to break "the doldrum" in its negotiations with the U.S. Nuclear talks with Washington remain deadlocked after Kim Jong Un's last summit with President Donald Trump in 2019 broke down without an agreement, and North Korea desperately needs relief in the face of harsh U.S.-led sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic. "North Korea is using South Korea as a scapegoat and a stepping stone to build the context and the momentum for its engagement with the U.S. as the ultimate North Korean strategic goal is attracting the attention of the U.S., and President Trump in particular," Kim Jin Ah said. Kim Jong Un's struggle to address economic woes has likely faced setbacks as the coronavirus pandemic forced North Korea to close its border with China, its biggest trading partner. North Korea says it hasn't reported a single outbreak, but foreign experts have questioned that claim. Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a lecturer in international relations at King's College London, said it's reasonable from the North Korean perspective for the regime to try to divert attention from domestic conditions by raising tensions with South Korea. "It makes sense for Kim Yo Jong to lead, or be seen as leading, these increasing tensions. This way she can show that she will be tough with South Korea if necessary," he said. Pacheco Pardo said raising tensions is also a way for North Korea to try to force the South Korean government to put pressure on the Trump administration to allow sanctions exemptions, or even relief. "It makes sense for North Korea to focus on raising tensions with South Korea, at least until we know the outcome of the U.S. November election and we can see what type of dynamic relations between Washington and Pyongyang will follow next year," he
Lets not forget another major Trump failure https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...of-enriched-uranium-in-breach-of-nuclear-deal Iran triples stockpile of enriched uranium in breach of nuclear deal Watchdog says country may also be storing material at three undeclared sites Iran has nearly tripled its stockpile of enriched uranium since November in violation of its deal with world powers and is refusing to answer questions about three possible undeclared nuclear sites, the UN atomic watchdog agency has said. The International Atomic Energy Agency made the statement in a confidential report distributed to member countries that was seen by the Associated Press. The agency said that as of 19 February, Iran’s total stockpile of low-enriched uranium amounted to 1,021kg, compared with 372kg noted in its last report on 3 November 2019. The stockpile puts Iran within reach of the amount needed to produce a nuclear weapon, which it insists it does not want to do. The nuclear deal that Iran signed in 2015 with the US, Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), allows it to keep a stockpile of just under 203kg. The JCPOA promised Iran economic incentives in return for curbs on its nuclear programme, but since Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the deal in 2018, Iran has been slowly violating the deal’s restrictions. Tehran has said it hopes to put pressure on the other nations involved to increase economic incentives to make up for hard-hitting sanctions imposed by Washington after the US withdrawal. In a second report issued on Tuesday, the IAEA said it had identified three locations in Iran where the country possibly stored undeclared nuclear material or undertook nuclear-related activities without declaring it to international observers. According to the Washington-based Arms Control Association, Iran would need roughly 1,050kg of low-enriched uranium — under 5% purity — and would then need to enrich it further to weapons-grade, or more than 90% purity, for a weapon. With the nuclear deal in place, Iran’s so-called “breakout time” – the period Tehran would need to build a bomb if it chose – stood at about a year. As Iran has stepped away from the limits of the 2015 nuclear deal, it has slowly narrowed that window. Before the nuclear deal, Iran enriched its uranium up to 20%, a short technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. In 2013, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was more than 7,000kg with higher enrichment, but it did not pursue a bomb. Iran has been violating other restrictions in the JCPOA, including the stock of heavy water it is allowed and the number and type of centrifuges it operates. It has announced the violations as they have occurred, and allowed IAEA inspectors access to verify them, saying the measures are all reversible if it gets the economic incentives it needs.