US, Japanese and South Korean officials on Thursday discussed their joint commitment to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and other regional security topics at a trilateral meeting in Hawaii, a White House statement said.
Moreover, there would be no soft response from the three countries if North Korea were to hold a nuclear weapons test, Yonhap news agency yesterday cited South Korean National Security Office Director Kim Sung-han as telling his US and Japanese counterparts.
The comment came amid signs the North has completed preparations to conduct its first nuclear test since 2017.
Photo: REUTERS
“If North Korea conducts its seventh nuclear test, the response will be clearly different from the past,” Kim told Yonhap reporters on Thursday.
“We have agreed there should never be such a complacent thinking or response that North Korea has conducted just another nuclear test in addition to the six tests it did,” Kim said.
North Korea has conducted missile tests at an unprecedented pace this year.
In the middle of last month, it fired two cruise missiles from the west coast after South Korea and the US resumed their largest field exercises in years.
Pyongyang has long denounced them as a rehearsal for war.
During Thursday’s talks, the three officials also agreed to cooperate on global supply chain issues, while Kim separately raised concerns over new US rules on subsidies for electric vehicles, South Korea’s presidential office said.
Kim said after a bilateral meeting with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan the previous day that Washington has promised to review the impact of the new rules after Seoul raised concern they could hurt South Korean automakers.
Separately yesterday, Pyongyang accused the newly appointed UN special rapporteur on North Korean human rights of being a “puppet of the US” and making “unpardonable reckless remarks” against the regime.
The accusations came as the new rapporteur, Elizabeth Salmon, visited Seoul on her first trip since being appointed to the role last month.
Salmon, a Peruvian professor of international law, has had a series of meetings with South Korean officials and civic group members to discuss the situation in the North since arriving earlier this week.
“We had already made clear our principled stand that we neither recognize nor deal with any ‘special rapporteur’ who is merely a puppet of the US,” said an unnamed spokesman for the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an English-language statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The spokesman said the rapporteur’s activities were cover for a US smear campaign against the North, accusing Salmon of daring to make “unpardonable reckless remarks encroaching upon our inviolable system and sovereign rights.”
“The UN should no longer allow its name and mission to be misused for the US hostile policy” toward North Korea, he said.
The UN established the position in 2004 as international concerns grew over allegations of human rights abuses in the North.
None of the special envoys have been granted access to the country for a fact-finding mission.
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