“I do want to talk about our readiness, and ensure the things that we need to do to be prepared if diplomacy fails,” Mr. Shanahan told reporters aboard his plane to Seoul, the South Korean capital. A South Korean news daily also reported that Mr. Kim had engineered a sweeping purge of the country’s top nuclear negotiators after the breakdown in Hanoi, Vietnam, of his second summit meeting with Mr. Trump. Still, after the failed meeting, which ended without an agreement on how, or whether, to shut down the North’s nuclear weapons program, Defense Department officials said the Pentagon would once again suspend two large-scale joint military exercises that were scheduled for this spring, to maintain the truce that Mr. Trump had struck with Mr. Kim. In June last year, without consulting the Pentagon, the president suspended major military exercises with South Korea after meeting Mr. Kim for the first time, in Singapore. Two months later, Mr. Trump rebuked Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, for opening the door to resuming the exercises.

Source: New York Times June 02, 2019 12:22 UTC