N. Korea to close nuclear test site next month, open its dismantling to outside: Cheong Wa Dae

SEOUL, April 29 (Yonhap) -- North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has promised to close down his country's nuclear test site next month and to invite outside experts and journalists to witness its dismantling, Seoul's presidential office said Sunday. During his meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday, Kim also offered to move his country's clocks 30 minutes forward to unify time zones with the South. Moon and Kim held the third-ever inter-Korean summit at the border truce village of Panmunjom. They reaffirmed their shared goal of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. They also agreed to work toward a formal end of the Korean War within this year, to halt all hostile acts and to push for a series of inter-Korean cooperation projects. During the summit, Kim told Moon that he will "carry out the closure of the northern nuclear test site in May," Moon's chief press secretary Yoon Young-chan told reporters. North Korea has conducted all six of its nuclear tests in Punggye-ri in the northeast since 2006. The sixth and most recent one was carried out on Sept. 3, 2017. On April 21, Pyongyang announced after a key ruling party meeting that it would dismantle the site because it has already completed its nuclear development. "Chairman Kim offered to invite South Korean and U.S. experts and journalists to open (the shutdown) to the international community," Yoon said. "President Moon immediately welcomed the proposal, and the leaders agreed the two sides will begin consultations on schedules and other details as soon as preparations are done," he added. Kim also dismissed some experts' claim that the experiment site is already useless and that parts of it collapsed in the wake of its latest nuclear detonation. "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," Yoon quoted Kim as saying. Kim also said he is wrongly seen as a belligerent man, expressing his willingness to improve ties with the United States ahead of his planned summit with President Donald Trump, possibly in May. "Although I am inherently resistant toward America, people will see that I am not the kind of person who fires nukes at South Korea, the Pacific or America," he said. "Why would we keep nuclear weapons and live in difficult conditions if we often meet with Americans to build trust and they promise to end the war and not invade us?" Kim said he does not want to repeat the "painful history of the Korean War," adding, "Concrete measures are necessary to stop any accidental military confrontation from happening." In a rare reconciliatory gesture, Kim also made a surprise proposal to change the North's time zone to match the South. Seoul's standard time is 30 minutes ahead of Pyongyang. In 2015, North Korea changed its standard time and returned to one used before Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula in 1910-45. "I feel sad to see that there are two clocks hung on the wall of the Peace House (the summit venue), one for Seoul time and the other for Pyongyang time," Kim was quoted as saying while the two leaders and their wives were waiting for a summit dinner hosted by Moon. "Since it was we who changed the time standard, we will return to the original one. You can make it public." Kim's decision appears to indicate his willingness to more actively harmonize and unify the North with the international community and to remove obstacles to exchanges and cooperation with the South and the United States in the future, Yoon said. jaeyeon.woo@yna.co.kr (END)