North Korea Resumes Nuclear Talks with US Next Saturday

Government of North Korea  has declared that nuclear talks with  the United States will be  resumed next Saturday.

Officials of the two countries will meet again after  seven months following the collapse of a summit in Vietnam between the two countries’ leaders, the North’s state media reported on Tuesday.

Pyongyang and Washington have agreed to have preliminary contact on Friday, before officials come to the table over the weekend to try break the diplomatic stalemate over the North’s nuclear missiles programme, KCNA said, citing Choe Son Hui, the vice foreign minister, according to The Telegraph.

“The delegates of the DPRK side are ready to enter into the DPRK-U.S. working-level negotiations,” Ms Choe said in the statement, using North Korea’s official name, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

“It is my expectation that the working-level negotiations would accelerate the positive development of the DPRK-U.S. relations.”

The location of the proposed meeting has not yet been revealed, and there has been no immediate public confirmation from the Trump administration.

The tentative breakthrough was announced just hours after Kim Song, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, berated the US for its failure to restart the talks, which hit an impasse when Donald Trump, the US President, and Kim Jong-un failed to reach an agreement in Hanoi in February.

The announcement was relayed through Choe Son Hui, the vice foreign minister in North Korea.

Pyongyang said in early September that it was willing to kick start disarmament negotiations by the end of the month if Washington adopted an “alternative” approach that met the interests of both countries, warning that a failure to do so could “spell an end to bargaining.”

In his speech at the UN General Assembly on Monday, Kim Song said it was time for Washington to share its new proposal.

“Assuming that the U.S. has had enough time to find out a calculation method that can be shared with us, we expressed our willingness to sit with the U.S. for comprehensive discussion of the issues we have deliberated so far,” he said.

He reminded the gathering of the statement issued by Mr Trump and Kim after their first historic meeting in Singapore in June last year, where the two leaders agreed to foster new relations and work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

“More than one year has passed,” he said. “The relations between the DPRK and the US have made little progress so far and the situation of the Korean peninsula has not come out of the vicious cycle of increased tension.”

“It depends on the US whether the DPRK-US negotiations will become a window of opportunity or an occasion that will hasten the crisis,” he said.

Mr Trump, who is keen for a foreign policy win ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and his administration have repeatedly urged the North Koreans to come back to the negotiating table, despite Kim repeatedly testing short-range missiles throughout July and August.