Seoul pushes for dialogue

South Korea wants to reopen communications with North Korea, officials said yesterday.

New President Moon Jae In, who campaigned on a more moderate approach to the North, is seeking a two-track policy involving sanctions and dialogue with its reclusive neighbour to rein in its nuclear and missile programmes.

North Korea has made no secret of the fact 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 UN Security Council resolutions, was on Sunday 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, told reporters yesterday.

“The Unification Ministry has considered options on this internally but nothing has been decided yet.”

Communications were severed by the North last year, Lee said, in the wake of new sanctions following North Korea’s last nuclear test and Pyongyang’s decision to shut down a joint industrial zone operated inside the North.