US negotiators ‘don’t know’ if North Korea intends to remove nuclear weapons, contradicting Donald Trump

US officials negotiating with North Korea to rid the country of nuclear weapons do not know if Pyongyang intends to accept that goal, a senior administration official said on Thursday, contradicting earlier comments made by US President Donald Trump and his administration.

“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 engaging with them,” a senior administration official said in a briefing with reporters.

The comments come amid preparations for a second summit meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, scheduled to take place next week in Hanoi. The first meeting, held in June in Singapore, ended with commitments to work toward normalisation of US-North Korea relations as well as a denuclearisation plan, which has been criticised for a lack of details.

Since then, Trump’s North Korea diplomacy has been called into question as military analysts have flagged the existence of hidden military bases capable of deploying nuclear-tipped missiles.

“Of course we’ve had no denuclearisation since Singapore,” Bruce Klingner, a former deputy division chief for Korea at the CIA, said at a Heritage Foundation event with journalists on Thursday, around the same time as the White House briefing.