Denuclearise or risk overthrow, Trump to North Korea’s Kim

The United States (US) President Donald Trump has told North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un to abandon nuclear weapons and be rewarded with “protections” or risk being overthrown and possible death if the arsenal remains.

Trump laid out the stark choice for North Korea’s leader ahead of their planned summit in Singapore on June 12, according to media reports.

The US President maintained that the scheduled June 12 meeting in Singapore was on track, in spite of North Korea’s threat on Wednesday to cancel over concerns about the US push to see the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea had argued that it needed its nuclear weapons to preserve its security and had expressed concerns about giving up on its nuclear weapon.

It cited the example of the late former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who had given up his nuclear programme in the 2000s, but died at the hands of rebel forces amid a popular uprising in October 2011.

Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, explicitly cited “the Libya model of 2003 to 2004” as a basis for the North Korea talks in May, which drew personal rebuke from the North Korean government on Wednesday.

Trump, while trying to address the North Korean concerns, said if Kim were to agree to denuclearise, “he’ll get protections that would be very strong,” warning that failure to make a deal could have grave consequences for Kim.

On the ‘Libya model,’ Trump said: “That model would take place if we don’t make a deal.

“The Libyan model isn’t the model we have at all. In Libya, we decimated that country. There was no deal to keep Gaddafi.”