North and South Korea set for high-level talks

The talks came a day after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un said the country had developed a hydrogen bomb – a claim greeted with scepticism by USA and South Korean intelligence officials.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Kim had made the assertion during a visit to the Phyongchon Revolutionary Site, which honours the works of his father and grandfather, who ruled North Korea before him.

“At this point, you know, the information that we have access to calls into serious question those claims”, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a regular briefing of the North’s H-bomb claims.

Now the reunions are being held less than once a year and with only a very limited number of participants-despite a huge waiting list of largely elderly South Koreans desperate to see their relatives in the North before they die.

He pointed out that all parties concerned should make efforts to facilitate dialogue, ease tensions and build trust on the Peninsula.

The United Nations Security Council convened on Thursday for a meeting to discuss “the situation in the Democratic People’s republic of Korea”, particularly with regard to human rights.

“The South Korean government is going in there with its eyes wide open and looking to get whatever it can, including promises from the North that there will be no more overt acts of provocation along the border”, said Okumura.

“There are many issues to be discussed”. Should that prove to be the case, and should both sides indicate they are keen to continue, then there is a possibility that discussions could move on to more substantive issues.

South Korea is expected to place priority on resolving the issue of separated families, while the North is expected focus on resuming tourism to Mount Geumgang.

The South Korean Unification Vice Minister Hwang Boo-ki, the representative from South Korea, arrived at Kaesong at 9:23 a.m., welcomed by the North Korean chief representative Jeon Jong Soo, the vice chief of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland.

If true, the development would mark a significant advancement in North Korean nuclear capabilities.

Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies added to Reuters that he thinks it’s “unlikely” North Korea has actually developed a hydrogen bomb. David Khoury, export director of the Israel Tax Authority, said that “there was export of gold, and regretfully [the U.N.] discovered this and we were required to give explanations”.

However, any such device it might be working on would be cruder and more old-fashioned than the classical H-bomb and would require larger nuclear tests than North Korea has yet conducted.

But they also noted that North Korea has repeatedly vowed to improve the quality of its nuclear weapons.