SEOUL, June 7 -- Washington still wants North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. Pyongyang's answer, delivered as Xi Jinping prepares to arrive in the country, is that the question itself belongs to a vanished world. The US demand for denuclearization, North Korean state media said Sunday, is an anachronistic dream.

The dismissal, attributed to Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, was not a new position so much as a harder restatement of one the North has been building toward for years. There would be no talks premised on disarmament. Any engagement with the United States, she has said before, must begin from the recognition that North Korea is a nuclear-weapons state, not a candidate for giving them up.

The timing...