Seven months after denuclearisation talks between the US and North Korea broke down at a summit in Vietnam, DPRK state media reported that talks will resume on Saturday, October 5.
In a statement by the official Korean Central News Agency, vice foreign minister Choe Son Hui said on Tuesday, “The DPRK and the US agreed to have preliminary cpntct on October 4 and hold working-level negotiations on October 5.” Choe added that “The delegates of the DPRK side are ready to enter into the DPRK-US working-level negotiations” and that “It is my expectation that the working-level negotiations would accelerate the positive development of the DPRK-US relations”.
The Trump administration had yet to report on the statement at press time.
On Monday, North Korea’s representative to the United Nations launched a scathing attack on the United States at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) saying that relations between the US and North Korea “have made little progress so far and the situation of the Korean Peninsula has not come out of the vicious cycle of increased tension” in the one year that passed since Trump and Kim first met in Singapore in 2018, then promising to work towards the denuclearisation of the Koraen Peninsula.
The news came after the recently-ousted national security advisor John Bolton said he disgreed with the Trump administration’s strategy towards the DPRK, in his first public statement since being fired three weeks ago. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Bolton said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will “never give up the nuclear weapons voluntarily”.
Bolton’s statements contradicted the Trump administration’s claim that the DPRK was working towards giving up its nuclear weapons.
North Korea last tested its nuclear weapons in January and September of 2016, in what was the country’s first tests of a hydrogen bomb and of a nuclear warhead that could be attached to a missile, respectively.
