North Korea says it won't get rid of its nuclear weapons until the US does

North Korea has said it will never give up its nuclear weapons unless the United States does the same.

A statement released though the official Korean Central News Agency accused Washington of being misleading over the agreement between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

Following the summit between the two leaders, the US President claims he had successfully negotiated denuclearisation, but talks between the two countries have stalled since.

During the summit in Singapore on June 12, the two leaders issued a vague goal for the “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean Peninsula without describing when and how it would occur.

But in the statement released on Thursday, North Korea said: “The United States must now recognise the accurate meaning of the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, and especially, must study geography.

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“When we talk about the Korean Peninsula, it includes the territory of our republic and also the entire region of (South Korea) where the United States has placed its invasive force, including nuclear weapons.

“When we talk about the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat, not only from the South and North but also from areas neighbouring the Korean Peninsula.”

North Korea expert Robert Kelly, Professor of Political Science, branded Mr Trump’s tweets on North Korea as “just baloney”.

In a series of tweets he said that while US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials had said “we were going into this with our eyes open”, North Korea was “pulling all their old tricks” and “slow-walking the whole process”.

He added: “And Trump still hasn’t even gotten an inventory of the nuclear & missile materials on which to base our bargaining with them over denuclearization. So, no, things are not going fine.”

He said the US President had continued to place “unjustified faith” in his relationship with Kim Jong Un and said Mr Trump has to talk in the way he is to “keep up the appearance of a foreign policy success for domestic reasons”.

“But it should be pretty clear at this point that the NKs are setting the pace and that we’re locked in the same back-and-forth slog with them as before,” he said.

“The promise of 2018’s summit diplomacy – that direct meetings between Kim, Trump, and Moon – would leapfrog the bureaucrats and generate a big-bang breakthrough has not materialized. Now we have all the time in the world to negotiate with NK, Trump says, even though this spring Pompeo & Bolton were saying the opposite. Whatevs.

“In short, they probably won’t give up much, they’ll ask a lot in return, & verification is going to be hellishly complicated on anything they do surrender. We all need to start adjusting to NK as a nuclear weapons state and think about management and missile defense.”