Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, will seek to revive stalled talks on nuclear disarmament between the US and North Korea when he jets into Pyongyang on Tuesday morning for a three-day summit with Kim Jong-un. Mr Moon will be the first South Korean leader to visit North Korea’s capital in 11 years and he will be accompanied by an entourage of senior business executives and K-pop stars as he attempts to bolster economic, cultural and security ties. He is expected to land at 10am (2am BST), and may be greeted personally by Kim at the airport before proceeding to the negotiating table and a banquet in the evening. On the eve of his departure for his third direct meeting with Kim this year, Mr Moon pledged to hold “heart-to-heart talks” to push for better ties between Pyongyang and Washington. “What I want to achieve is peace. I mean irreversible, permanent peace that is not shaken by international politics,” Mr Moon said during a meeting with top advisers, according to his office. But Im Jong-seok, his chief-of-staff, played down expectations that the summit will produce a major breakthrough on the process of denuclearisation, which has plunged into a deadlock since the historic meeting between Kim and Donald Trump, the US president, in Singapore in June. Mr Moon will push for a second summit between Kim and Mr Trump, where he believes progress can be made on disarmament. His aides revealed that he wants to find “a middle ground” between the US position on denuclearisation and the North’s request for assurances over security and ending hostilities. In a press briefing, Mr Im predicted that the summit would take “meaningful” steps to “fundamentally remove the danger of armed clashes and ease fears of war” between the two Koreas, moving them closer to formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War with a peace treaty. Proposals could include the disarmament of sections of the jointly controlled border area or the removal of front-line guard posts. Trump-Kim summit in pictures: Best photos from Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un's meeting in Singapore While the moves would be significantly more modest than Kim giving up his nukes, analysts say they are key to building an atmosphere of trust that will avoid future military escalations on the Korean Peninsula. “Most of the crises around North Korea have been started by some kind of small-scale military exchange on the border that has threatened a larger war,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. “Anything you can do to decrease that possibility – moving artillery pieces and physical forces back - would be good for decreasing tensions,” he told The Telegraph. “Are we getting closer to our goal of denuclearising the Korean Peninsula? No. But we have a dramatically reduced risk of war on the Korean Peninsula compared to this time last year.”
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