Thread by @MesMitch

Kim Jong-un signals North Korea will resume nuclear missile tests
Dictator says Washington’s ‘gangster-like demands’ mean self-imposed ban no longer needed

Kim Jong-un has signalled that North Korea will lift its moratoriums on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests in a move likely to anger Donald Trump.

In response, Trump said he had a good relationship with Kim and believed the North Korean leader would keep his word to refrain from nuclear and long-range missile tests.

“He did sign a contract, he did sign an agreement talking about denuclearisation. ... That was done in Singapore, and I think he’s a man of his word, so we’re going to find out,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said he hoped North Korea would choose peace over war. “So, seeing that reporting publicly, it remains the case that we hope that chairman Kim will take a different course,” Pompeo told Fox News in an interview.

“We’re hopeful that ... chairman Kim will make the right decision – he’ll choose peace and prosperity over conflict and war.”

In an interview with CBS News, Pompeo said Kim should honour commitments he made in meetings with Trump last year. “If chairman Kim has reneged on the commitments he made to president Trump, that is deeply disappointing,” Pompeo said.

“He made those commitments to president Trump in exchange for president Trump agreeing not to conduct large-scale military exercises. We’ve lived up to our commitments. We continue to hold out hope that he will live up to his as well.”

North Korea has previously fired missiles capable of reaching the entire US mainland and has carried out six nuclear tests.

A self-imposed ban has been at the centre of the nuclear diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington over the past two years, which has involved three meetings between him and Trump, but little tangible progress.

The US had made “gangster-like demands” in the talks process, Kim said, including continuing joint military drills with South Korea, adopting cutting edge weapons and imposing sanctions.

“The world will witness a new strategic weapon possessed by [North Korea] in the near future,” Kim said.

“We will reliably put on constant alert the powerful nuclear deterrent capable of containing the nuclear threats from the US and guaranteeing our long-term security.”

Any actual test is likely to infuriate Trump, who has repeatedly referred to Kim‘s “promise” to him not to carry them out, and played down launches of shorter-range weapons.

Negotiations between the two sides have been largely deadlocked since the breakup of their Hanoi summit in February.

The North Korean leader’s announcement on Wednesday came after the United States missed a year-end deadline for a restart of denuclearisation talks.

Kim convened the rare meeting of the ruling party’s policy-making committee on Saturday as the US had not responded to his repeated calls for concessions to reopen negotiations, dismissing the deadline as artificial.

“There is no ground for us to get unilaterally bound to the commitment any longer,” the official KCNA news agency cited Kim telling top ruling party officials.

“The world will witness a new strategic weapon to be possessed by the DPRK in the near future,” he added, using the acronym for the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Washington had “conducted tens of big and small joint military drills which its president personally promised to stop” and sent high-tech military equipment to the South, he said, and stepped up sanctions against the North.

“We can never sell our dignity,” he added, saying Pyongyang would “shift to a shocking actual action to make [the US] pay for the pains sustained by our people”.