Days before United States president's second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, US officials on Thursday said that they are not sure whether Pyongyang intends to denuclearise, according to media reports.
"I don't know if North Korea has made the choice yet to denuclearise but the reason why we're engaged in this is because we think there's a possibility that North Korea can make the choice to fully denuclearise and that's why the president has assigned such a priority to engage with them," a senior administration official was quoted as saying in the South China Morning Post.
The remarks come amidst preparations for a second summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un, which is scheduled to take place in Hanoi, Vietnam next week.
Notably, Bruce Klingner, a former deputy division chief for Korea at the CIA, today claimed that North Korea continues to nuclearise despite its promise.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump had said that he is in "no rush" to denuclearise the Korean peninsula, irrespective of the fact that the agenda was always on top of the table for the US.
The second US-North Korea summit is seen as a breakthrough amid the prevailing impasse between Pyongyang and Washington over sanctions, which led to impeded growth in denuclearisation efforts in the Korean peninsula.
During the first Summit, held at Singapore's Sentosa Island, both Trump and Kim had agreed on a spectrum of issues, the most prominent being the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
However, the US and North Korea reached an impasse regarding sanctions relief for Pyongyang soon after the first Summit, leading to extremely slow progress on the denuclearisation front.
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