By Steve Holland, Jacob Bogage and David Brunnstrom
WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this year, and said the Asian nation held 57 "very powerful" nuclear weapons.
The remarks came after Trump ordered Pentagon officials to cut short joint military exercises with South Korea, saying they sent a message to Pyongyang that was "totally inappropriate and hostile" to a country that had been "unthreatening
and respectful."
When asked on Wednesday if he expected to meet Kim later this year, Trump responded: "Yeah, I will be."
Trump said on Monday he had received a response from Kim following his attempts to reengage. The Wall Street Journal reported that he has pushed aides to arrange an in-person meeting with Kim as soon as this autumn.
North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump's latest remarks, but they came just after Kim's powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, said she was unaware of any recent communications between the two countries' leaders.
Kim Yo Jong also said that while the relationship between the leaders of the United States and North Korea was "truly great," Washington was still carrying out the drills with Seoul and threatening the national security of Pyongyang.
Trump held an unprecedented series of summits with Kim in 2018 and 2019, but the diplomatic efforts broke down over U.S. demands that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Trump has since referred to North Korea repeatedly as a "nuclear power,"although his administration has continued to call for the country's denuclearization and does not formally recognize it as a nuclear-weapon state.
Trump has sought to revive the diplomatic efforts in his second term.
"I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he's going to be fine as long as we have a smart president," he told reporters on Wednesday during a tour of a helipad he is constructing on the White House's historic South Lawn.
"The fact that I get along with him - that's a good thing, not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons," Trump said. "They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn't have allowed it. But he's got them."
Trump's citing of a specific number of nuclear weapons held by North Korea was highly unusual.
The U.S. government does not publicly publish an official estimate of North Korea's nuclear arsenal, although a 2025 report by the Congressional Research Service cited non-governmental experts as estimating that North Korea has produced enough fissile material for up to 90 warheads but may have assembled approximately 50.
In June, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that North Korea has "possibly assembled around 60 warheads, possesses enough fissile material to produce at least 30 more."
During Trump's first term, Kim called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and threatened that he had use of a "nuclear button" on his desk.
But the two leaders turned that tension into face-to-face meetings, 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.
(Reporting by Steve Holland, Jacob Bogage, Idrees Ali and David Brunnstrom; editing by Michelle Nichols, Don Durfee and Alistair Bell)
