North Korea "working on new missiles", US officials say

North Korea appears to be building new ballistic missiles despite recent warming ties with the Trump administration, media reports say.

Unnamed US officials told the Washington Post that spy satellites had spotted continuing activity at a site that has produced ballistic missiles.

Reuters news agency quotes an official as saying it is unclear how far the work has gone.

President Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June.

After the first meeting between sitting leaders from the two countries, the two men pledged to work towards denuclearisation. 

Mr. Trump later said North Korea was "no longer a nuclear threat".

But Mr. Trump was criticised at home for making concessions without securing any firm commitment from Mr. Kim to end the nuclear and missile programmes.

A North Korean expert from MIIS, Melissa Hanham, noted on Twitter that the "pattern of life" on the site stayed "about the same through the Panmunjom and Singapore meetings",

This indicated that there had not been a complete stop in activity during the summit talks.

However, she said experts at MIIS could not "confirm all parts of the leak".


<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en-gb"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">To be clear, we could not confirm all parts of the leak. 1/<a href="https://t.co/bo2fC5l1Vq">https://t.co/bo2fC5l1Vq</a></p>— Melissa Hanham (@mhanham) <a href="https://twitter.com/mhanham/status/1024086948648898560?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">31 July 2018</a></blockquote>
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North Korea has carried out a total of six nuclear tests, the most recent of which took place in September last year. It has in the past two years quickly advanced its nuclear programme.

But at their landmark meeting in Singapore, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim agreed to work towards the "complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula".

SOURCE: BBC News
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