President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and he repeated his assessment that North Korea has 57 "very powerful" nuclear weapons.
The president made the remarks while touring a helipad he is having built on the White House's historic south lawn, telling reporters: "I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he’s going to be fine as long as we have a smart president." He added: "The fact that I get along with him - hat’s a good thing, not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons."
Trump also said: "They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got them." The comments followed a directive from the president instructing Pentagon officials to curtail ongoing joint military exercises with South Korea. In a social media post on Sunday, Trump wrote that those exercises had sent a message to Pyongyang that was "totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful."
Relations between the two leaders have fluctuated. The rapport that developed around in-person meetings in 2018 and 2019 later cooled. The leaders had several face-to-face encounters, including a brief exchange at the demilitarized zone between the Koreas in which Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korean territory.
The record also recalls earlier public insults and threats exchanged between the two leaders. During Trump's first term, Kim called him a "mentally deranged U.S. dotard" and threatened that he had use of a "nuclear button" on his desk.
Independent estimates of North Korea's nuclear holdings have differed over time. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in June estimated that the country had "possibly assembled around 60 warheads, possesses enough fissile material to produce at least 30 more." The institute's assessment reflects differing analytic judgments about how many warheads North Korea has assembled and its potential production capacity.
Trump’s public remarks tied together three elements: an intention to meet with Kim, a personal assessment of their relationship, and a pointed statement about Pyongyang’s nuclear capability. He made these comments against the backdrop of his decision to order the shortening of joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises, which he characterized as sending an inappropriate message to North Korea.