Mike Pompeo, the U.S. secretary of state, said that the United States could help North Korea rebuild its economy if the reclusive, communist nation agrees to denuclearize.
The United States will be “prepared to work with North Korea to achieve prosperity on the par with our South Korean friends,” Pompeo told reporters.
President Donald Trump had announced that a summit between North Korea and the United States would be held on June 12 in Singapore.
“What Chairman Kim will get from America is our finest—our entrepreneurs, our risk takers, our capital providers... .They will get private capital that comes in. North Korea is desperately in need of energy...for their people. They are in great need of agricultural equipment and technology,” Pompeo said on CBS' “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Reuters reported.
“We can create conditions for real economic prosperity for the North Korean people that will rival that of the South,” he added. “That is our expectation. It won’t be U.S. taxpayers. It will be American know-how, knowledge entrepreneurs and risk takers working alongside the North Korean people to create a robust economy.”
“Every single site that the North Koreans have that can inflict risk on the American people that is destroyed, eliminated, dismantled is good news for the American people and for the world,” Pompeo told “Fox News Sunday.”
North Korea said it would welcome reporters from South Korea, China, Russia, and the United States to watch the dismantling process, NBC News reported.
The United States, he said, is pursuing “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.”
“On the denuclearization side of the program, that means all aspects of their nuclear program,” he added. “Clearly, the ballistic missiles program, as with Iran, with the intention of being a delivery system for nuclear weapons—that’s gotta go. I think we need to look at their chemical and biological weapons programs as well. The President’s going to raise other issues, the Japanese abductees, South Korean citizens who were kidnapped.”