The Minister of Unification of South Korea, Chung Dong Young, has warned this Thursday that North Korea's nuclear capabilities have multiplied by 100,000 in the last 30 years, so he emphasized that continuing to bet on the total denuclearization of the country "is no longer sustainable."
Chung explained that Pyongyang has continued to expand and perfect its atomic arsenal with the aim of achieving an "irreversible" status, while sidelining multilateral talks on the issue. "The harsh truth is that the idea of promoting complete denuclearization, as was done in the past, has ceased to be sustainable," he pointed out during a forum, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The minister specified that North Korea's nuclear capacity has multiplied by 100,000 since 1992, the year in which the regime communicated to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had 90 grams of plutonium. In contrast, recent estimates from the United States government calculate that North Korea could currently have 57 nuclear weapons, considering that between 4 and 8 kilograms of plutonium would be needed to manufacture a bomb.
In this line, he insisted that activities related to its nuclear program continue "even at this very moment" and assessed that the shift in the approach of U.S. President Donald Trump represents a "great transformation" that could "open a window of opportunities."
Likewise, he has valued the efforts of the South Korean government to "play an active role in achieving peace and promoting dialogue between the United States and North Korea." Chung also insisted that Seoul must do "everything possible" to sustain these conversations and expand them, so that China is also included and a "peace regime on the Korean Peninsula can be established based on the unstable armistice system."