Seoul,
\nSouth Korea\u2019s president said on Thursday that many \u201ccritical moments\u201d still lay ahead to end the nuclear crisis despite North Korea\u2019s recent outreach to Seoul and Washington.<\/p>\n
Moon Jae-in spoke before two senior Seoul officials headed to the United States later on Thursday to brief officials about the outcome of their recent visit to North Korea.<\/p>\n
The Seoul officials said North Korea offered talks with the United States over normalising ties and denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. Seoul said the North also agreed to suspend nuclear and missile tests during such future talks.<\/p>\n
Some experts question how sincere North Korea is about its reported offers, citing what they call its track record of using past disarmament talks to wrest aid and concessions while covertly continuing its bomb programme.<\/p>\n
According to the South Korean officials, North Korea said it had no reason to possess nuclear weapons as long as military threats against the country were removed and its security is guaranteed.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the same position North Korea has long maintained to justify its nuclear programme or call for the withdrawal of 28,500 US troops and a halt to annual US-South Korean military drills as a condition for scrapping its nuclear programme. The North sees the allies\u2019 drills as an invasion rehearsal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve overcome one critical moment. But there are many critical moments that we still have to go through before reaching the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and a permanent peace,\u201d Moon said in a meeting with church leaders.<\/p>\n
Moon still described the outcome of his envoys\u2019 North Korea trip \u201ca big step towards denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula\u201d that was possible with \u201ca strong support\u201d by the US government.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear whether the United States would accept the North\u2019s reported offer for talks. President Donald Trump expressed both hope and skepticism, calling it \u201cpossible progress\u201d that also \u201cmay be false hope\u201d.<\/p>\n
Seoul and Washington plan to kick off their delayed springtime drills next month, and how sensitively the North would react would affect the current reconciliation mood flared after the North\u2019s participation in last month\u2019s Winter Olympics held in the South.<\/p>\n
The North responded to past joint drills by the allies with its own weapons and fiery rhetoric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seoul, South Korea\u2019s president said on Thursday that many \u201ccritical moments\u201d still lay ahead to end the nuclear crisis despite North Korea\u2019s recent outreach to Seoul and Washington. Moon Jae-in spoke before two senior Seoul officials headed to the United States later on Thursday to brief officials about the outcome of their recent visit to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24189,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24190,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24188\/revisions\/24190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}