YEAH NO

North Korea Has ‘No Interest’ in Summit if Nukes Must Be Surrendered

Pyongyang tells Trump to stop making “one-sided” demands or he’ll be “more tragic” than his predecessors.

North Korea says it is no longer interested in a highly anticipated summit with President Trump next month if it is required to fully abandon its nuclear program. In an abrupt departure from Pyongyang’s amicable rhetoric of the past several weeks, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan on Wednesday lashed out at the U.S., saying Trump will go down in history as “more tragic” than his predecessors if he keeps pushing for complete denuclearization. “We are no longer interested in a negotiation that will be all about driving us into a corner and making a one-sided demand for us to give up our nukes and this would force us to reconsider whether we would accept the North Korea-U.S. summit meeting,” Kim said in a statement released by the official KCNA news agency. He singled out John Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser, for demanding the complete abandonment of nuclear weapons, calling it an “awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq.” His remarks came just hours after Pyongyang unexpectedly pulled out of a high-profile meeting with Seoul planned for Wednesday over upcoming joint U.S.-South Korea military drills.