PYONGYANG: North Korea on Saturday lashed out at what it called “rapacious” US demands, just hours after the conclusion of what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had called “productive” talks.
State media said the regime’s "firm, steadfast" resolve to give up its nuclear programmes may falter after the United States demanded unilateral denuclearisation during two days of talks in Pyongyang.
The results of talks with the delegation headed by Pompeo were "extremely troubling”, the official KCNA news agency said, accusing Washington of insisting on complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation.
The "fastest way" to achieve a nuclear-free Korean peninsula was through a phased approach under which both sides took steps at the same time, KCNA said in a statement, citing an unnamed foreign ministry spokesman.
"The US attitude and positions at the high-level talks on Friday and Saturday were extremely regrettable," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement, the Yonhap news agency in South Korea reported.
US negotiators and their North Korean counterparts discussed the idea of Pyongyang making a full declaration of its weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and setting a timeline for giving them up, Pompeo said on Saturday.
"These are complicated issues but we made progress on almost all of the central issues," he told reporters on Saturday on the airport tarmac before leaving Pyongyang, following his third visit to North Korea. "We had productive, good-faith negotiations.”
Pompeo said that North Korea, in the "many hours of talks" at a walled-off guesthouse outside downtown Pyongyang, reiterated its commitment to denuclearisation. The North Korean delegation was led by Kim Yong-chol, a senior aide to the country’s leader. Kim ended Pompeo’s visit on a positive note, telling the top US diplomat just before he boarded his plane, "We will produce an outcome, results."
For now, those results must remain in the future. Pompeo, who did not meet with leader Kim Jong-un on this trip, could point to no concrete achievement from the talks aside from an agreement for the two sides to meet around July 12 in Panmunjom, the border village between the two Koreas, to discuss returning the remains of US soldiers from the 1950-53 Korean War.
He said North Korea had confirmed it intended to destroy a missile-engine testing facility and the two sides discussed the "modalities" of what that would look like. The countries also agreed to create working groups that will be overseen by Sung Kim, the US ambassador to the Philippines who has handled some lower-level discussions, to work out what State Department spokeswoman called the "nitty gritty details" of future talks.
While Pompeo hailed progress from the talks, the results he announced on Saturday will do little to quell unease that North Korea’s commitment to denuclearisation, made when President Donald Trump met with Kim Jong-un in Singapore last month, is a facade and it has no intention of giving up its weapons.
Critics and analysts who study North Korea have argued that the country’s commitment to the "complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula," as spelled out in a joint declaration from the Singapore summit, doesn’t go as far as other promises to give up its nuclear weapons that North Korea had made -- and reneged upon -- many times in the past.
In recent days, intelligence reports have shown that North Korea is continuing work at a key rocket-engine facility. The US has also stopped using the catchphrase of "complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation" of North Korea that it had insisted upon happening before North Korea gets any relief from a crippling sanctions regime.
That change raised suspicion that the US was softening its demands for the country, an argument that State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert had insisted on Friday wasn’t true.
Pompeo has bristled at the idea that the Singapore declaration amounted to an empty promise, saying repeatedly that Kim Jong Un had assured him in private conversations he was ready to give up his nuclear arms.
But fissures have emerged in the US stance. Last week, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said North Korea could be expected to carry out the "bulk" of denuclearisation within a year. Yet Pompeo himself had earlier said he envisioned that occurring in about two and a half years, by the end of Trump’s term, and Nauert later said the US wasn’t putting a timeline on the process.
Before events in Pyongyang had concluded, Nauert told reporters that Pompeo had been "very firm” in insisting that North Korea fulfills its commitment to "complete denuclearisation”.
She said the two sides had also discussed the return of the remains of American troops killed during the Korean War.
Pompeo’s visit represents the highest-level meeting between US and North Korean officials since Trump and Kim Jong-un held their unprecedented summit in Singapore on June 12.
The secretary of state is under pressure to deliver a more concrete disarmament plan after the two leaders signed a vague one and a half page document that didn’t provide a timetable for dismantling North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
