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Pompeo: North Korea Still Making Fuel for Nuclear Bombs

by VOA News

   North Korea is still producing fuel for nuclear bombs despite pledges
   to give up its nuclear program, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
   said Wednesday.

   Questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pompeo said North
   Korean leader Kim Jong Un's regime was continuing to produce fissile
   material.

   He declined to answer questions about whether the North's nuclear
   program was still advancing generally and whether Pyongyang was looking
   to acquire ballistic missiles that could be launched from submarines.

   Pompeo said he preferred to answer such questions in a "different
   setting," meaning in a classified briefing. He told the senators that
   answering those questions in public could hurt "complex negotiations
   with a difficult adversary."

   During last month's Singapore summit with President Donald Trump, Kim
   promised to denuclearize. He gave no timetable and Pompeo said it would
   be impossible to predict when that would happen.

   Just after the summit, Trump tweeted that North Korea was no longer a
   nuclear threat.

   Pompeo said Wednesday that the "primary systems" that have threatened
   the U.S. still existed. He said what Trump most likely meant by his
   statement was that the tension between the U.S. and the North had been
   "greatly reduced."

   But Pompeo told lawmakers that ongoing talks with North Korea were
   "verifiable evidence" of movement toward denuclearization. He said Kim
   understood the U.S. definition of denuclearization and that the North
   was not taking the Trump administration "for a ride." He told the
   lawmakers that they could sleep easy at night.