be engaged in a "great deception" by offering to dismantle one missile base while developing sixteen others, and that this expansion program was long known to American intelligence but contradicted Trump's public assertions that his diplomacy was yielding results. Immediately following the June 2018 summit, Trump had declared "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea... sleep well tonight!" A third inter-Korean summit was held September 18–20, 2018, which sought a breakthrough in the hampered talks with the U.S. and a solution for the denuclearization on the Korean peninsula. In November 2018, North Korea repeated its demand that U.S. economic sanctions be lifted as a condition for proceeding with talks, while the Trump administration continued to insist that North Korea make concessions first. Meetings between Pompeo and North Korean officials were scheduled, canceled due to disagreements, and then rescheduled. The February 2019 summit was confirmed after Kim Yong-chol, North Korea's top negotiator, met with Trump in the Oval Office on January 18, 2019. In the days leading up to the summit, Trump declared that former president Barack Obama had been on the verge of going to war with North Korea and had told Trump so during the transition, which suggested that Trump had pulled the U.S. back from the brink of war; former Obama aides denied these claims. Trump also suggested that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomacy with North Korea, with the U.S. informally asking Japan to nominate Trump, according to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which reported Shinzo Abe doing so, but reports were neither confirmed nor denied, as it is tradition to keep nominations confidential. Noting that one of North Korea's primary objectives is to replace the Korean Armistice Agreement with a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, Scott Snyder, the senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, observed, "What I worry about is the president may want the peace most — more than the denuclearization...[o]ne of the big worries that people have is that somehow the president is going to trade the alliance for the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize." Top American intelligence officials testified to Congress in January 2019 that it was unlikely North Korea would fully dismantle its nuclear arsenal, and Trump national security advisor John Bolton continued to believe North Korea could not be trusted and that denuclearization efforts would fail. Trump