North Korea drops demand for US troop withdrawal from South in boost for talks

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has reportedly dropped his demand that US troops leave the Korean Peninsula in return for giving up his nuclear weapons, potentially removing one of the biggest obstacles to a peace deal.

The US has about 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea, which has long been a thorny issue with the North Koreans and used by Pyongyang as a justification for building its nuclear programme as a deterrent.

However, on Thursday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who will meet with Mr Kim at a summit next Friday, said the reclusive leader was now willing to give up the troops’ removal as a precondition for denuclearisation.

“The North Koreans did not present any conditions that the United States could not accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops in South Korea,” Mr Moon told newspaper publishers in Seoul, reported the New York Times.

“They only talk about an end to hostilities against their country and about getting security guarantees,” he said. “It’s safe to say that the plans for dialogue between the North and the United States could proceed because that has been made clear.”

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It emerged this week that US President Donald Trump had sent CIA Director Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang over Easter to assess how genuine North Korea was in its recent overtures towards peace, and to lay the groundwork for a planned summit between the US President and the North Korean leader.

Mr Kim’s latest concession, although not yet publicly acknowledged by North Korea, was revealed shortly after Mr Trump insisted he would be willing to leave his own meeting with Mr Kim if it fell short of his expectations.

The two leaders are set to have an unprecedented summit in late May or early June, making Mr Trump the first sitting US President to do so.

“If we don’t think it’s going to be successful, we won’t have it,” he warned. “If the meeting when I’m there isn’t fruitful, I will leave the meeting.”

Bill Hagerty, the US ambassador to Japan, said Mr Trump would use the summit to demand also the elimination of the North’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

He said the issue came up in broader discussions on the North’s weapons capabilities between Mr Trump and Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this week. 

“We had broad-ranging discussions on the topic and it extended beyond denuclearisation to the topics of chemical and biological weapons as well”, Mr Hagerty said. 

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“The president’s intention is to see all of these weapons of mass destruction eliminated from the Korean Peninsula and the strategy remains the same in terms of complete, verifiable and irreversible aspects of denuclearisation”, he told Yonhap news. 

The North is believed to have large reserves of weaponised chemical and biological agents - including hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, sarin, tabun, chlorine and a number of derivatives of mustard gas - and a number of defectors have claimed the regime has used its own citizens as guinea pigs in weapons tests. 

Based on their testimony, a report by the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 2014 estimated that North Korea is able to manufacture 4,500 tonnes of chemical agents a year, but has the capacity to ramp that annual output up to 12,000 tonnes. 

The report added that the regime has provided chemical and biological agents - widely regarded as the weapons of mass destruction of less technologically advanced nations - to Egypt, Iran, Libya and Syria since the 1990s. 

In an earlier hint of North Korea's shifting stance towards US forces, Mr Kim already signaled in March that he would not oppose joint US-South Korean military exercises, which had been postponed because of the Winter Olympics.

The annual joint drills have normally been denounced as a provocation by Pyongyang, with North Korea accusing the allies of preparing for an invasion.