Saturday, 23 Nov 2024

Nuclear row: Donald Trump says North Korea knows what US ‘must have’

North Korea knows what the United States “must have” when it comes to nuclear disarmament by Pyongyang, Donald Trump has said following the collapse of his summit with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam.

He added that “we know what they want”, and claimed the relationship between the two countries was “very good”.

There has been disagreement, though, about what caused the meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Kim in Hanoi to fail.

On the table were the secretive communist state’s nuclear programme, and US sanctions.

The president claimed Mr Kim asked for all sanctions to be removed in exchange for closing the Yongbyon nuclear facility, where North Korea enriches uranium.

But North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, said Mr Kim demanded that only some sanctions were lifted in exchange for shutting the country’s main nuclear complex.

Mr Trump tweeted: “Great to be back from Vietnam, an amazing place.

“We had very substantive negotiations with Kim Jong Un – we know what they want and they know what we must have.

“Relationship very good, let’s see what happens!”

South Korea said it would do all it could to assist the US and the North as they sought an agreement.

President Moon Jae-in said his administration would “help their talks reach a complete settlement by any means”.

Iran, meanwhile, has mocked Mr Trump for the way in which the summit ended.

Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the US president should have realised that “pageantries, photo-ops and flip-flops do not make for serious diplomacy”.

Mr Zarif also asserted that the US would not get a better nuclear deal with Iran than the one it quit last year.

“It took 10 years of posturing plus two years – literally thousands of hours – of negotiations to hammer out every word of the 150 page JCPOA (Iran nuclear accord),” Mr Zarif added.

“You’ll never get a better deal.”

But White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the president was simply making sure an eventual deal was worth signing.

“President Obama refused to walk away from a bad deal with Iran,” she tweeted.

“President Trump refuses to make the same mistake with Iran, North Korea, or anybody else.

“President Trump will always put the safety of the American people above politics.”

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