North Korea promised to close its atomic test site next month and invite US weapons experts to the country, Seoul said yesterday.
The reported pledge from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un follows weeks of whirlwind diplomacy that saw the leaders of North and South Korea agree to pursue the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula during a historic summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday.
“Kim said during the summit with President Moon that he would carry out the closing of the nuclear test site in May, and would soon invite experts of South Korea and the US as well as journalists to disclose the process to the international community with transparency,” South Korean presidential spokesman Yoon Young-chan said. “Kim said: ‘The US feels repulsive about us, but once we talk, they will realize that I am not a person who will fire a nuclear weapon to the South or the US or target the US.’”
Photo: AFP / KCNA via KNS
“If we meet often [with the US], build trust, end the war and eventually are promised no invasion, why would we live with the nuclear weapons?” Kim reportedly said.
The remarks are likely to be seen as a sweetener ahead of US President Donald Trump’s own planned summit with Kim, which the US leader said would take place “in the next three or four weeks.”
Trump vowed to do “the world a big favor” by achieving a nuclear deal with the regime at a campaign-style rally in Michigan to cheers and chants of “Nobel, Nobel.”
On Saturday, North Korea described its summit with the South as a “historic meeting” that paved the way for the start of a new era.
North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency carried the text of the leaders’ Panmunjom Declaration in full and said the encounter opened the way “for national reconciliation and unity, peace and prosperity.”
In the document, Kim and Moon “confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
Kim also said he would move the nation’s clocks 30 minutes forward to unify with the South’s time zone as a conciliatory gesture, Seoul said.
The two countries have had different time zones since 2015, when the North suddenly changed its standard time to 30 minutes behind the South.
Pyongyang cited a nationalistic rationale, saying it would return the North to the time zone used before the Japanese Empire’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the peninsula to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation.
Kim said he found it “heartbreaking” to see two wall clocks hanging at the summit venue showing different times for the two neighbors, Yoon said.
“Since we were the ones who made the change from the standard time, we will go back to the original time. You can announce it publicly,” Yoon quoted Kim as saying.
Yoon hailed the gesture as a “symbolic move” for better ties between Seoul and Pyongyang.
The creation of “Pyongyang time” drew criticism from Moon’s conservative predecessor, former South Korean president Park Geun-hye, for further deepening the disparity between the two Koreas, whose division was sealed by the 1950-1953 Korean War.
The two nations have remained technically at war after the conflict ended with an armistice instead of a peace treaty.
Moon and Kim on Friday vowed to seek a formal end to the war.
North Korea is not the only nation to have used a time zone to assert its national identity.
China and India have imposed single time zones to promote unity across their vast territories, with people in China’s westernmost provinces keeping to Beijing time, despite the sun rising two hours later than in the capital.
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