Trump-Kim deal signals North Korea may never give up its nuclear weapons

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hasn’t given up a single nuclear weapon, but that didn’t stop President Donald Trump from reassuring Americans on Twitter that they should “sleep well” because the nuclear threat fromPyongyang is over. 

That public strategy is leading some analysts to believe Trump might be willing to live with a nuclear armed North Korea just as the U.S. has learned to live with other nuclear nations, like Pakistan and India. Despite tough U.S. talk before the summit about “complete” and “verifiable” denuclearization, the vaguely worded 1 1/2-page document Trump and Kim signed doesn’t include that language and essentially represents “tacit approval” of North Korea’s nuclear program, said Jeffery Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, California. “I don’t think it would be the end of the world, because it’s the world we already live in,” he said. “My worry is that the president keeps promising that Kim will give up his weapons. If he suddenly wakes up one day and realizes what’s really going on, he could just explode, and then we’re in real trouble.”