“How could they make a decision in that fashion that would have global fallout?” he asked journalists.

The White House’s decision concerning negotiations with North Korea in Hanoi last year was a “total mess”, Moon Chung-in said, with Bolton overturning moves by bureaucrats to keep a steady handle on the nuclear issue.

“Bolton is paranoid,” Moon said. “His basic idea is to put maximum pressure on the North with sanctions and if it resists, military means should not be taken off the table. He does not care about other people’s lives at all and this line of thought is conveyed by the memoir.”

The adviser described Bolton as one of the “most hated persons” of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, whose “sunshine policy” of rapprochement with Pyongyang has also been followed by the current president.

Moon Chung-in was a key behind-the-scenes player in the engagement with North Korea under Kim Dae-jung, who won a Nobel Peace Prize following a historic 2000 inter-Korean summit with late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

He said Abe asserted the North would never give up its nuclear weapons no matter what incentives it would be granted.

“The bad is Bolton, the ugly is Abe and the reasonably good is President Trump,” Moon Chung-in said, adding that US Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, was a “very good man”.

The draft called for a freeze on the North’s ongoing nuclear weapons programme in return for partially lifting sanctions, and envisioned a road map that would call for further sanctions relief in return for progress on denuclearisation down the road, Moon Chung-in said.

But Bolton objected strongly, called Vice-President Mike Pence and they ripped the draft apart, he said.

Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha on Monday said Bolton’s memoir The Room Where It Happened is “a book that clearly displays a far-right perspective”.

“It is clear that Bolton had advised the president through the prism of the far-right wing,” she said during a parliamentary session, in her first comments on the publication.

“It appears that his viewpoint has influenced the US policy on North Korea to a considerable extent,” she said of the book in which the author described much of the diplomacy with North Korea as sideshow that lacked substance and could never bear fruit.

Bolton defended himself, saying it would be a “disservice” to the South Korean people if he did not write the truth.

Bolton book reveals ‘Xi Jinping’s personal appeals to Trump’ on Huawei and ZTE

The head of South Korea’s National Security Office at the presidential Blue House, Chung Eui-yong, who was Bolton’s counterpart and was referred to frequently in the memoir, said much of the book’s account about South Korea was “distorted”, reflecting Bolton’s own biases and prejudices rather than facts.

The publication of diplomacy between governments is a “breach of basic diplomatic principle, and can severely damage trust in future negotiations”, Chung said, adding Seoul had conveyed this position to the White House.

The book sparked anger in Seoul for Bolton’s disparaging account of President Moon’s efforts to help arrange the three summits between Kim Jong-un and Trump in 2018 and 2019, alongside Bolton’s scathing criticism of Trump’s “erratic” policy decisions. Bolton described Moon’s engagement with the North as “schizophrenic”.

What John Bolton’s book doesn’t reveal – why Donald Trump acts the way he does

Lawmakers from Moon’s ruling Democratic Party (DP) also lambasted Bolton, with DP lawmaker Kim Han-jung calling his statements the “arguments of a mindless hawk”.

Another DP lawmaker, Youn Kun-young, who helped arrange the Moon-Kim summit at the border truce village of Panmunjom in 2018, said there were “so many things that do not match reality” in the book, without going into details.

A third DP lawmaker, Kim Kyung-hyup, said the memoir reveals how Bolton “tried to derail the North Korea-US summit” in Hanoi, and reflects “the true sentiments of the American neoconservatives and arms dealers”.