South, North Korea hold first talks in years — with an Olympic ring to them

SEOUL, South Korea — North and South Korea began their first direct talks in more than two years on Tuesday, starting a dialogue that raised hopes for a thaw after months of escalating tensions over the North’s nuclear weapons program.

The meeting between Cho Myoung-gyon, the South Korean Cabinet minister in charge of relations with the North, and his North Korean counterpart, Ri Son Kwon, opened at 10 a.m. Korea time Tuesday in the village of Panmunjom, according to pool reports from the South Korean news media, taking place in the middle of the world’s most dangerous and fortified border.

In the talks, South Korean officials are expected to find ways to accommodate the offer by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next month. But they also want to explore whether North Korea is interested in talks with the United States to ease tensions over its nuclear arms programs.

In his New Year’s Day speech, Kim proposed holding a dialogue with South Korea to discuss his country’s participation in the Pyeongchang Games. In the same speech, he also claimed to have acquired a nuclear deterrent, including intercontinental ballistic missiles he said he could unleash on the United States with his “nuclear button.”

Some analysts said Kim was hoping to use his country’s selfproclaimed status as a nuclear weapons state as leverage to win concessions from Washington, particularly the easing of increasingly crippling sanctions. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said that Kim’s decision to start dialogue with South Korea was a sign that their campaign to isolate the North was working.

The talks at Panmunjom provide an opportunity to gauge whether North Korea is willing to moderate its behavior after a year of provocative nuclear and missile tests that have raised fears of all-out war.

But the initial focus will be on the Olympics.

To get the North Koreans to participate, South Korean officials must nail down the travel route, lodging and other logistics of a North Korean Olympic delegation. They are also expected to propose that the two delegations march together behind a “unified Korea” flag during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics, a symbolic gesture for a peninsula that was divided into the Soviet-backed North and the pro-American South upon liberation from Japan’s colonial rule at the end of World War II.

If the North competes in Pyeongchang, it will be the country’s first participation in the Winter Games in eight years. The country has competed in every Summer Olympics since 1972, except the 1984 Games in Los Angeles and the 1988 Games in Seoul, both of which it boycotted.

In fact, if the North Koreans do come to the South for the Olympics, it would be a historic development in inter-Korean sports exchanges. orth Korea has traditionally sent only a small delegation to the Winter Games and has never won a gold medal at them.

The International Olympic Committee is eager for the North to return, promising to help cover its athletes’ expenses in Pyeongchang.