Hanoi: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told the US Secretary of State he did not want his children to live with the burden of nuclear weapons, a former CIA officer involved in high-level diplomacy over the North’s weapons was quoted as saying Saturday.
Kim made the rare personal comments to Mike Pompeo during a visit to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in April last year to lay the groundwork for the historic first summit between the North’s leader and US President Donald Trump in June in Singapore, former CIA official Andrew Kim said.
“‘I’m a father and a husband and have children’,” Andrew Kim quoted the North Korean leader as telling Pompeo, when asked whether he was willing to end his nuclear programme.
“‘And I don’t want my children to carry the nuclear weapon on their back their whole life.’ That was his answer,” Andrew Kim told a lecture Friday at Stanford University’s Asia Pacific Research Center, where he is a visiting scholar.
In their Singapore summit, Kim and Trump pledged to work towards peace between their countries and for the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.