North Korea Ready for Talks With South on Ending 71-Year State of War

The DPRK is still officially at war with both the ROK and the US since the 1953 armistice ended hostilities in a bloody conflict on the Korean peninsula, although there have been periods of détente between the two republics.

North Korea is ready for a new summit with its southern neighbor to agree on a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War.

The sister of Kim Jong Un, the president of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) stated on Saturday that peace talks could proceed if there was respect and impartiality from their southern neighbor, the Republic of Korea (ROK).

"I think that only when impartiality and the attitude of respecting each other are maintained, can there be smooth understanding between the north and the south," Kim Yo Jong said.

She added that the people of the partitioned country share the desire for peace.

"I felt that the atmosphere of the South Korean public desiring to recover the inter-Korean relations from a deadlock and achieve peaceful stability as soon as possible is irresistibly strong," Kim said. "We, too, have the same desire."

The commander-in-chief's sister sounded more conciliatory than on Friday, when she slammed Seoul's "double-dealing".

"What needs to be dropped is the double-dealing attitudes, illogical prejudice, bad habits, and hostile stand of justifying their own acts while faulting our just exercise of the right to self-defence," Kim said at the time. "Only when such a precondition is met, would it be possible to sit face-to-face and declare the significant termination of war".

South Korean President Moon Jae-in was elected in 2017 in part on a promise of improved relations with the North and a return to the "sunshine policy" of economic cooperation, as well as a reopening of the heavily-fortified border. According to reports, Moon has since engaged in sabre-rattling with Pyongyang.

A recent peace process begun during the Trump administration stalled, but Trump's successor, US President Joe Biden, told the UN General Assembly this week that he wanted "sustained diplomacy" to achieve Washington's goal of unilateral North Korean nuclear disarmament.

Pyongyang reiterated its strategic capabilities last week, conducting a test-launch of a pair of rail-mobile ballistic missiles — just hours before Seoul tested its first submarine-launched ballistic missile.

The DPRK became the eighth confirmed nuclear power in 2006, when it conducted an underground test of an atomic device. In 2017, the country successfully detonated a thermonuclear weapon with a yield said to be in the region of 200 kilotons of TNT, following test-flights of ballistic missiles said to be capable of striking coastal regions of the western US mainland.