Nuclear envoys of South, U.S. and Japan call on North to ditch hostile rhetoric

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Nuclear envoys of South, U.S. and Japan call on North to ditch hostile rhetoric

Published: 18 Jan. 2024, 17:46

Kim Gunn, South Korea's nuclear envoy, center, shakes hands with his American counterpart Jung Pak, right, and Japanese counterpart Hiroyuki Namazu, left, at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul on Thursday. [NEWS1]

The nuclear envoys of South Korea, the United States and Japan urged the North to cease its increasingly hostile rhetoric against the South and return to denuclearization talks.

Meeting with the U.S. nuclear envoy Jung Pak and Japanese nuclear envoy Hiroyuki Namazu in Seoul on Thursday, South Korean nuclear envoy Kim Gunn criticized the North for clinging to the “old playbook” of shifting blame to the South and the U.S. and creating tensions “for the sake of internal solidarity.”

“We call on North Korea to immediately stop provocations, lift its self-imposed ban on talks, and come back to the path of denuclearization, peace and prosperity,” Kim said.

The meeting followed a series of meetings among the envoys in Seoul this week to discuss the North’s latest military provocations, including its launch of a ballistic missile last Sunday.

“We strongly condemn this launch, which violates multiple UN Security Council resolutions,” Pak said in the meeting.

She added that the North’s “unlawful, nuclear and ballistic missile programs,” arms transfers to Russia to aid its invasion of Ukraine, continued cyberattacks around the world and human rights violations against its people demanded coordinated action from Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Pak also criticized the North’s increasingly hostile rhetoric against the South in recent weeks, which was “unnecessarily increasing tensions” on the Peninsula.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un recently called for South Korea to be designated the regime's top enemy in the constitution of the country, according to a report in the official newspaper of the North's ruling party earlier this week.

Namazu, in turn, called on the North to address immediately the issue of abductions of Japanese citizens in the meeting, thanking his U.S. and South Korean counterparts for their cooperation on the matter.

The three envoys also met bilaterally between Wednesday and Thursday in Seoul, addressing the North Korean foreign minister’s visit to Moscow this week in their talks.

North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday. The Kremlin's statement a day later suggested the two sides discussed defense and security issues.

“We are aimed at developing relations in all areas, including sensitive ones,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reportedly told the press on Wednesday.

Following the White House announcement earlier this month that Russia had used short-range ballistic missiles provided by North Korea in attacks against Ukraine, nearly 50 foreign ministers, including those of South Korea, the United States and Japan, issued a statement condemning the North.

Both Pyongyang and Moscow have denied that arms shipments have taken place, but South Korean and U.S. officials have cited satellite reconnaissance of Rajin port in North Korea, which shows a significant number of containers being loaded onto Russia-bound ships, as circumstantial evidence of weapons being delivered to Russia.

With the North warning it will launch at least three additional spy satellites into space this year, the U.S. Department of Defense announced this week that it will be assessing the North's ability to conduct warfare in space.

“As far as the idea of North Korea as a threat from space, if there are things that enable their ability to do a war fight, that is a thing that we take seriously and track and build into our plans,” John Plumb, the first assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told reporters in a press briefing on Wednesday, according to local reports.

However, he also cast doubt on the sophistication of North Korea's space technology.

BY ESTHER CHUNG [[email protected]]