Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, said on Sunday he hoped Kim Jong Un would make “a big step” towards abandoning nuclear weapons when the North Korean leader meets Donald Trump next week.
The forthcoming summit between Mr Kim and the US president is their second and follows their historic meeting in Singapore last year. At that meeting, Mr Kim pledged to denuclearise and Mr Trump subsequently declared North Korea was “no longer a nuclear threat”.
“He promised he’d denuclearise. We hope he’ll make a big step towards that in the week ahead,” Mr Pompeo told CNN. The US secretary of state said North Korea remained a nuclear threat, arguing that Mr Trump had only said the risk had been “substantially taken down”.