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North Korea has announced on state media it will dismantle its nuclear test site just weeks ahead of a summit with President Donald Trump.

The rogue nation will start to take the facility apart on May 23, with international media watching.

The country's central news agency said the dismantlement of the nuclear test ground would involve collapsing all of its tunnels with explosions, blocking its entrances and removing all observation facilities, research buildings and security posts.

Journalists from other countries, including the United States and South Korea, will be invited to cover the event.

The nuclear site that will be dismantled is located in Pukyung, and the area around Pumyeong nuclear test site will also be closed.

(Image: EPA)

(Image: AFP) (Image: 38 North/Airbus Defense & Space/Spot Image)

The dismantling will be just less than three weeks before a much-awaited summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Last month, Kim Jong-un and South Korea's President, Moon Jae-in, agreed to work together to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Last month, five nuclear test blasts in Pyongyang, under Mount Mantap, tore open a hole in the mountain which then collapsed upon itself.

Researchers also found that breakdown created a "chimney" which could allow radioactive fallout from the blast zone below to rise into the air.

Now, U.S. intelligence showed North Koreans had already started pulling cables from the tunnels at their nuclear test site.

This week three Americans held prisoner by the communist country were released and flown back to the USA.

The choice of Singapore as the site of the first-ever meeting of a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader was as much because it was within reasonable flight time and distance from Pyongyang as because of the island state's political neutrality, a South Korean presidential official told reporters.

But experts say the process could take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to USA Today.

Olli Heinonen, an arms control expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think-tank, said: "This would be the biggest undertaking by the international community when it comes to denuclearization or disarmament."

(Image: REUTERS)

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John Bolton, Trump's national security advisor, previously said the dismantling of Libya's nuclear program in 2003 might serve as a model.

But Libya's programme was not nearly as advanced as North Korea's and the country had not already stockpiled weapons.

(Image: REUTERS) (Image: REX/Shutterstock)

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Since becoming North Korea's leader in 2011, Kim has only taken one known overseas trip by air - and that was earlier this week to Dalian in China to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

He flew in his personal Ilyushin-62M jet accompanied by a cargo plane that people with knowledge of North Korean affairs say is believed to have carried his limousine.

"It looks very much like the trip to Dalian was a dry run," said Andray Abrahamian, a research fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS and formerly with Choson Exchange, a Singapore-based group that trains North Koreans in business skills.

(Image: QiZHAI/Twitter) (Image: REX/Shutterstock)

At 4,700 km from Pyongyang's Sunan airport, Singapore is easily in the range of the Il-62M aircraft.

The Soviet-era narrow-body jet with four engines was first introduced in the 1970s and has a maximum range of 10,000 km.

But the Ilyushin-76 cargo plane cannot fly more than 3,000km without refuelling if carrying a full load. It will therefore have to stop off at a friendly location like Vietnam's capital on the way to Singapore or fly with a reduced load.