NORTH KOREAN LEADER FEELING GENEROUS

While discussing terminating his country’s nuclear program, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un also talks of allowing observers and moving clocks forward a half hour to match the same time zone as Seoul and Tokyo.

TOKYO» The South Korean government is trying to keep the momentum in diplomatic efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff, announcing Sunday that the Kim regime would dismantle its main nuclear test site next month and was prepared to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The South’s presidential Blue House also revealed a symbolic step of goodwill from the North Korean leader: It would move its clock forward half an hour to return to the same time zone as Seoul and Tokyo.

This came two days after the historic summit between South Korea’s Moon Jaein and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, which resulted in a joint statement containing a vague agreement to work toward the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Kim pledged to dismantle its nuclear test site at Punggye-ri, in the north of the country, in May and would invite international experts and journalists to watch, a Blue House spokesman said Sunday.

“Some say that we are terminating facilities that are not functioning, but you will see that we have two more tunnels that are bigger than the existing ones and that they are in good condition,” Moon’s chief press secretary, Yoon Young-chan, quoted Kim as saying.

There have been reports that the test site, buried under Mount Mantap, was suffering from “tired mountain syndrome” and was unusable after last September’s huge test, which caused an earthquake so big that satellites caught images of the mountain above the site actually moving.

But numerous nuclear experts have cast doubt on that theory, and Kim apparently did, too.

Kim said he would invite security experts and journalists to the North to observe the closure of the site, Yoon said.

That will likely prompt skepticism in Washington, given that in 2008 North Korea invited international journalists to film the destruction of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, from which it had been harvesting plutonium to make its first bombs.

All the while, it turned out North Korea was building a separate uranium enrichment facility, so it could continue to produce fissile material even without Yongbyon.

Kim also reportedly said he had no intention of using his nuclear weapons against neighboring countries.