The president of the United States, Donald Trump, assured this Wednesday that North Korea has 57 nuclear weapons and emphasized that he gets along "well" with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, with whom he intends to hold a new meeting towards the end of the year.
"The fact that I get along well with him is a good thing, not a bad thing. They have 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. They should never have allowed that to happen; they should never have allowed it. If I had been president, I would not have allowed it, but they have them," he indicated in statements to the press.
Questioned about the possibility of a new face-to-face with the leader of Pyongyang, the Republican president reiterated that it will happen. "As long as we have an intelligent president, it will go well, but if we had a stupid one, it probably wouldn't go so well," he said.
These statements come shortly after the head of the White House announced that he has ordered the Pentagon to cut "substantially" the joint military exercises with South Korea, considering that they are "costly" and send a "totally inappropriate and hostile" signal to North Korea.
In parallel, the South Korean government has put forward a new initiative directed at North Korea to definitively close the state of war that has persisted between them for 70 years, an offer on which Pyongyang has not yet commented.
Trump has reiterated that he is willing to resume dialogue with the North Korean regime "without setting preconditions." During his first term, he already held three summits with Kim: in Singapore in June 2018, in Vietnam in February 2019, and in the demilitarized zone of Panmunjom in June 2019.