South Korea’s military said it is carefully monitoring North Korean nuclear and missile facilities after the country’s spy agency told lawmakers that new activity was detected at a research center where the North is believed to build long-range missiles targeting the U.S. mainland.
Defense Ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo said the U.S. and South Korean militaries are sharing intelligence over the developments at the North’s missile research center in Sanumdong on the outskirts of the capital, Pyongyang, and at a separate long-range rocket site. She did not elaborate on what the developments were.
Trump told reporters at the White House that time will determine the future of U.S. efforts to get North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to give up his pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for relief from sanctions stalling economic growth.
“We’ll let you know in about a year,” Trump said.
Briefing reporters at the State Department later, a senior U.S. official said that despite the new activity and the failure of last month’s Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi to reach a denuclearization deal, the administration still believes it can reach and implement an agreement by the end of the president’s first term. The official said it is important that progress be made quickly but that the goal is “achievable” by January 2021.
Trump said on Wednesday that his relationship with Kim remained “good” even though Trump walked away from negotiations at their high-profile meeting in Vietnam.
Joel Wit, a North Korea proliferation expert who helped negotiate with North Korea in the mid-1990s, said the new work at Sohae is Kim’s way of showing that he’s “getting impatient with lack of progress in negotiations.”
He said there is no evidence that North Korea’s work at the site signals Kim is preparing to test another missile. He said North Korea has never tested an ICBM at Sohae. “Preparations for any launch would require a wide range of activities not observed at the site,” Wit said.
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