U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter called on North Korea to shrink and eventually eliminate its nuclear weapons program, while acknowledging during a visit Sunday to the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas that prospects for reconciling with the defiant North are dim, AP reported. "For now what we have is what you see beyond us " a very starkly divided and heavily defended border area," Carter told reporters as he stood on the South Korean side of a marker inside the DMZ that forms the de facto border. Several yards to his rear was the start of North Korea's portion of the zone, which amounts to a buffer meant to keep the peace even though the two Koreas are technically still at war. It was Carter's first visit to the DMZ as defense secretary and marked the start of a weeklong Asia tour that also will take him to Malaysia.
