I hope that the North Koreans understand that the conclusions that we came to are conclusions that are embedded in America's security situation. - Ash Carter

The military option will remain on the table. If there is a good agreement to have, obviously it's worth waiting for and completing the negotiations.

Our nightmare, any of us, which would change the way we lived our lives, was if we thought that any moment Al Qaeda might detonate a nuclear weapon in a city anywhere in the world, because we learned that they had gotten hold of some plutonium from the North Koreans by sale, or when the North Korean regime collapsed, somebody smuggled it out.

There was never a conspiracy, never a tremendous fear. This is a society which is now in its third generation of severe political repression, so that children in North Korea have several hours of political education a day. Their parents did, and their grandparents did.