North Korea will never ditch its nukes, top intelligence expert warns – as world is forced to accept threat of nuclear apocalypse
James Clapper said nuclear warheads are North Korea's 'ticket' to survival and Kim Jong Un's regime will never give them up
THE policy of trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons is a "lost cause", a leading US intelligence boss says.
James Clapper, the Director of US National Intelligence, claims the best strategy to deal with the rogue states was to cap its capabilities.
President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that the US will never accept North Korean as a nuclear-armed state.
However, Clapper told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York this was not realistic.
He said: "I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause. They are not going to do that - that is their ticket to survival."
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Pyongyang has persisted with its missile and nuclear weapons programs, including a September 9 nuclear explosion, despite strong international sanctions.
Clapper said he got a good taste of how the world looks from North Korea's viewpoint when he went to Pyongyang on a mission in 2014 to secure the release of two Americans.
"They are under siege and they are very paranoid, so the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a non-starter with them.
"The best we could probably hope for is some sort of a cap, but they are not going to do that just because we ask them. There's going to have to be some significant inducements."
He was asked if he thought North Korea could mount a nuclear warhead on a missile that could reach the West Coast of the United States.
He described it as a "worst-case assumption" as Kim Jong Un had yet to test its KN08 intercontinental ballistic missile, so no-one knew if it worked.
"Nevertheless, we ascribe to them the capability to launch a missile that would have a weapon on it to reach parts of the United States, certainly including Alaska and Hawaii.
"They could do it. We have to make the worst-case assumption here."
A spokesperson for the State Department said US policy was unchanged and continued to be to seek the "verifiable denuclearization" of the Korean peninsula.
Rebuffed Clapper's comments, the spokesperson said: "No, nothing's changed... that's not our position.
"Our policy objective is to seek to obtain a verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
"That is the policy; that is both the goal and what we want to see and there is a way to do that."
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