U.S. directly communicating with North Korea

REUTERS, 1 October, 2017-  The United States said on Saturday it was directly communicating with North Korea on its nuclear and missile programmes but Pyongyang had shown no interest in dialogue.  

The disclosure by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during a trip to China represented the first time he has spoken to such an extent about U.S. outreach to North Korea over its pursuit of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.  “We are probing so stay tuned,” Tillerson told a group of reporters in Beijing.  

“We ask: ‘Would you like to talk?’ We have lines of communications to Pyongyang. We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout.”  

He said that communication was happening directly and cited two or three U.S. channels open to Pyongyang.  

“We can talk to them. We do talk to them,” he said, without elaborating about which Americans were involved in those contacts or how frequent or substantive they were.  

The goal of any initial dialogue would be simple: finding out directly from North Korea what it wants to discuss.  “We haven’t even gotten that far yet,” he said.