NewGetting North Korea to give up nuclear weapons is a “lost cause”: US intelligence chief

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A mock North Korea's Scud-B missile, left, and South Korean missiles are displayed at Korea War Memorial Museum in Seoul, South Korea. Photo: AP

Published: 6:35am, 26 Oct 2016

Efforts to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear programme and “denuclearize” the Korean Peninsula are bound to fail, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Tuesday.

The United States is set to deploy its THAAD missile defence system to South Korea as soon as possible, despite opposition from China, in an effort to protect against North Korea’s pursuit of missile and nuclear technology.

“The notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause. They are not going to do that. That is their ticket to survival,” Clapper said during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.

“And I got a good taste of that when I was there, about how the world looks from their vantage. And they are under siege, and they are very paranoid. So the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a non-starter with them.”

A man looks at models of Lockheed Martin's PAC-3, PAC-3 MSE and THAAD missiles during the Japan Aerospace 2016 air show in Tokyo, Japan. Photo: Reuters

Clapper, who went on a secret mission to North Korea in November 2014 to rescue two American prisoners, oversees the 17 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency.

State Department spokesman John Kirby rebuffed Clapper’s position, stressing that “nothing has changed about our policy with respect to the North.