WASHINGTON--The U.S. special envoy for North Korea laid out an extensive list of demands for North Korean denuclearization on Thursday that is likely to anger Pyongyang, even as President Donald Trump said the date and place for a second summit was set and hailed "tremendous progress" in his dealings with the country.
In a speech at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, envoy Stephen Biegun said North Korea would need to declare all its nuclear and missile programmes and warned that Washington had "contingencies" if the diplomatic process failed.
Biegun, in his most detailed public remarks on his approach to North Korea after five months in his role, said Washington would have to have expert access and monitoring mechanisms of nuclear and missile sites and "ultimately ensure removal or destruction of stockpiles of fissile material, weapons, missiles, launchers and other weapons of mass destruction."
Pyongyang has rejected declaring its weapons programs for decades.
Biegun also said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un committed during an October visit by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the dismantlement and destruction of plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities. The information from Biegun goes much further than Pompeo himself did after his trip and further than any public statement by Pyongyang.
While Biegun conceded there was "more work ahead of us than behind us," Trump appeared upbeat about the prospects for a second summit with Kim, telling reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday that a time and place had been agreed upon and would be announced next week.
He said he was making "tremendous progress" with North Korea. "They very much want the meeting. And I think they really want to do something, and we'll see."
Pompeo said on Wednesday that North Korea had agreed that the summit would be held at the end of February and that it would be "some place in Asia."
Trump and Kim met in Singapore last June in the first summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader, an event that produced a vague commitment by Kim to work toward the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, where U.S. troops have been stationed in the South since the 1950-53 Korean War. Pyongyang has yet to take concrete steps in that direction, in Washington's view, and the director of U.S. national intelligence, Dan Coats, told Congress on Tuesday that it was unlikely to give up all of its nuclear weapons and has continued activity inconsistent with pledges to denuclearize.
