nuclear-news

China expressed confidence that new United Nations sanctions would help bring North Korea to the negotiating table to end its push for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho to calmly react to measures to curb its exports and avoid more provocations when they met on Sunday in Manila, where diplomats from more than 20 countries are attending a security forum. Wang, who also called for the U.S. and South Korea to reduce tensions, said after meeting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that the sanctions “created the conditions to find a breakthrough.”

“The goal is to effectively block the DPRK’s nuclear development process,” Wang told reporters in Manila. “Sanctions are needed but not the ultimate goal. The purpose is to pull the peninsula nuclear issue back to the negotiating table, and to seek a final solution.”

As North Korea’s main ally and biggest trading partner, China’s role is crucial to pressuring leader Kim Jong Un into halting his push for a nuclear-tipped missile that can hit the U.S. mainland…….

Many analysts see the North Korean program as too advanced for sanctions to make much difference, and doubt the country will ever completely give up nuclear weapons……

Trump isn’t ruling out a “preventive war” to stop North Korea from being able to threaten the U.S., National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said in an interview with MSNBC done earlier in the week and broadcast Saturday. The danger posed by North Korea was “a grave threat,” he said.

“If they had nuclear weapons that can threaten the United States, it’s intolerable from the president’s perspective,” McMaster told MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt. Even so, the U.S. would prefer to resolve the threat “short of what would be a very costly war in terms of the suffering of, mainly, the South Korean people,” McMaster said. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-06/china-confident-un-sanctions-can-block-north-korea-nuclear-push