North Korea’s foreign ministry Saturday said a normalized relationship with the U.S. and its nuclear program are “completely separate issues,” adding that the country would not give up nuclear weapons as long as there remains a nuclear threat from America.
“Even if the North Korea-U.S. relationship becomes normalized diplomatically, as long as there is any possibility for the U.S. nuclear threat to remain present, our status as a nuclear country won’t change at all,” said a spokesperson of the foreign ministry, carried in Chosen Shinbo, a pro-North Korea newspaper based in Japan.
The remark comes amid an impasse in the multinational negotiation that aims to end the Stalinist country’s nuclear drive.
The U.S. State Department earlier this week issued a statement, calling on Pyongyang to move forward if it hopes to normalize its ties with the rest of the world, including America.
“This (U.S.) statement is an expression of America’s ‘big power’ mentality that portrays the normalization as if it were its present to us. It is also a distortion of the fundamentals in the nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, quoting South Korean observers, Yonhap said the North's statement is an attention-seeking tactic, meant for the incoming U.S. government.
"This is a message from North Korea to Obama," Paik Hak-soon, a senior researcher at Sejong Institute, said, "that North Korea wants a package deal and a more intense interest from the new U.S. president."
Kim Young-soo, a political science professor at Seoul's Sogang University, said, "North Korea is expressing its hope this way that Washington will be more aggressive in engaging in talks with it.” Obama’s inauguration comes on Jan. 20.