S Korea keen to talk with North on missile crisis
SOUTH KOREA: South Korea says it wants to reopen communications with North Korea, as new President Moon Jae In seeks a twotrack policy involving sanctions and dialogue with its reclusive neighbour to rein in its nuclear and missile programmes.
North Korea has made no secret that it is working to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking the United States mainland, and has ignored calls to rein in its nuclear and missile programmes, even from China, its lone major ally.
Its latest ballistic missile launch, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, was on Monday, which it said was a test of its capability to carry a ‘‘large-size heavy nuclear warhead’’.
‘‘Our most basic stance is that communication lines between South and North Korea should open,’’ Lee Duk Haeng, a spokesman for the South’s Unification Ministry, said yesterday.
‘‘The Unification Ministry has considered options on this internally but nothing has been decided yet.’’
Communications were severed by North Korea last year, Lee said, in the wake of new sanctions following its last nuclear test and Pyongyang’s decision to shut down a joint industrial zone operated inside the North.
Moon won an election last week campaigning on a more moderate approach to the North, and said after taking office that he wants to pursue dialogue as well as pressure to stop the North’s weapons programmes.
Moon’s envoy to the US, South Korean media mogul Hong Seok Hyun, left for Washington yesterday. Hong said he would discuss North Korea with high-ranking US officials.
Hong said South Korea had not yet received official word from the US on whether Seoul should pay for an anti-missile US radar system that has been deployed outside Seoul. US President Donald Trump has said he wants South Korea to pay for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.
The US said yesterday it believed it could persuade China to impose new UN sanctions on North Korea, and warned that Washington would also target and ‘‘call out’’ countries supporting Pyongyang.
‘‘You either support North Korea or you support us. You are either with North Korea or not,’’ US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said.
Speaking ahead of a closed-door UN Security Council meeting, Haley also made it clear that Washington would only talk to North Korea once it halted its nuclear programme.
US Disarmament Ambassador Robert Wood said yesterday that China’s leverage was key and Beijing could do more. – Reuters