United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed his “firm commitment” to North Korea’s denuclearization during his visit to Seoul on Friday, weeks after Pyongyang said it was “ready to mobilize its forces.”
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“I would like to reiterate our clear commitment to full, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and North Korea,” Guterres said in a meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.
This is a “fundamental goal of bringing peace, security and stability to the entire region,” he added, according to images broadcast by local television.
Before arriving in Seoul on Thursday, the UN Secretary-General was in Japan, where he delivered a speech to mark the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
On Monday in the Japanese archipelago, he repeated the severe warning about the horrors of nuclear weapons that he had issued last week in New York at an important conference on the non-proliferation treaty.
“We are witnessing a radicalization of the geopolitical situation that is once again turning the risk of nuclear war into something we cannot completely forget,” he told a news conference in Tokyo on Monday.
Washington and Seoul have repeatedly warned in recent months that North Korea is preparing for another nuclear test, which would be the seventh in its history.
On Thursday, Pyongyang accused Seoul of being behind the country’s COVID-19 outbreak and threatened to “exterminate” South Korean leaders.
Kim Jong Un’s regime conducted a record-breaking series of weapons tests this year, including an ICBM, for the first time since 2017.
In July, Kim Jong Un pledged that his country was “ready to mobilize its nuclear deterrent in the event of a military conflict with the United States or South Korea.”