North Korea’s official news agency today issued a statement reiterating the nation’s willingness to suspend all nuclear testing in return for a peace treaty to end the Korean War, and the cessation of U.S. military exercises aimed at them.
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China, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, is North Korea’s economic benefactor, but traditional ties have become strained as Beijing’s patience has worn thin with Pyongyang’s behaviour and unwillingness to rein in its nuclear weapons ambitions.
Former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker, one of the world’s top experts on North Korea’s nuclear program, said last week he did not believe it tested “a real hydrogen bomb”, and that “North Korea is still a long way off from being able to strike the US mainland”.
Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Akitaka Saiki, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken and South Korean First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Lim Sung-nam are attending the talks at the Iikura Guesthouse in Tokyo.
The allies have in the past repeatedly urged Pyongyang to focus on its own behavior rather than make their military exercises a condition for denuclearization.
Earlier this month, North Korea carried out an underground detonation test, the fourth of its kind.
The Security Council last approved sanctions against North Korea three weeks after its third nuclear test on February 12, 2013.
Shortly before taking office in 2009, he said he was willing to reconcile with the three countries, and during a 2007 debate said it was “ridiculous” to think that “somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of (the former President George W. Bush) administration”.
When asked about the proposal at a briefing Friday, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said he had not heard about the offer. State media on Monday showed him praising his scientists and vowing more nuclear bombs a day after the US flew a powerful nuclear-capable warplane close to the North in a show of force.
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“So it’s very hard to take any of their overtures very seriously, particularly in the wake of their fourth nuclear test”, he said, after meeting his counterpart from Japan and South Korea.
