North Korea's announcement that it has suspended nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile launches does not in any way mean that Pyongyang will stop or roll back its existing programs, several experts told CNBC.
"It would be remarkable if they spent 40 years developing these weapons and then give them away," said Robert Kelly, associate professor at Pusan National University.
He stressed that the North Koreans will walk out of the upcoming planned summit if American officials demand complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Anthony Rinna, an analyst at research group SinoNK, pointed to the examples of Libya and Ukraine as to why Pyongyang would not even contemplate getting rid of the weapons they have.
"North Korea looks at what happened to countries that divested themselves of a nuclear or weapons of mass destruction deterrent and realizes that as soon as they sacrifice their deterrent, they will suddenly become that much more vulnerable to outside interference," he said.
The experts agree that North Korea leader Kim Jong Un's entire policy is based on the parallel pursuit of nuclear weapons development and economic growth, so much so that it has even built monuments at nuclear test sites to memorialize past ICBM tests.
Tong Zhao, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center, a Beijing-based policy think tank, warned that North Korea's promises are merely a part of Kim's two-phased nuclear strategy in which the first phase has apparently been completed by obtaining nuclear deterrence despite economic sanctions and political isolation.
Zhao explained that Kim's second phase is his desire to keep existing nuclear capabilities and develop stable ties with the international community on that basis.
Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean studies professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School, said that Kim's current tactics is just a repeat of his father's policy in which the late Kim Jong Il "played all the great leaders" in the early 2000s by calling for meetings with Washington, Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo only to offer them "repeated lies of denuclearization."
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