MILITARY/NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/SOUTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Harry Harris, the Trump administration’s nominee to be ambassador to South Korea, said North Korea continues to be a nuclear threat and that major military exercises should be paused to give Kim Jong Un a chance to prove whether he is ‘serious.’ President Donald Trump announced in Singapore that the US would suspend ‘war games’ with South Korea and Japan, taking Seoul, Tokyo, lawmakers and parts of the US military by surprise…The summit in Singapore ‘wasn’t designed to solve all issues at once, but to be a starting point to start serious negotiations,’ Harris said, meant ‘to establish the modalities for what a complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization means and how we’re going to go about that.’ Sen. Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Harris whether North Korea is still a nuclear threat. Trump declared on Twitter that the country was no longer a nuclear threat and that the US is safer in the wake of his summit meeting with the North Korean leader, but Menendez noted Pyongyang still retains its missiles, its command of the nuclear fissile process and other capabilities.”
-Nicole Gaouette, “Trump pick for South Korea ambassador says North Korea remains a nuclear threat,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, June 14, 2018 2:16 pm