South Korea shifts to peace-first North Korea policy, dropping denuclearization as precondition for talks

South Korea has dropped its longstanding demand that North Korea disarm before any broader settlement, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said Thursday, reaffirming a shift toward halting further growth of the North's nuclear arsenal as an initial step, rather than requiring full denuclearization up front.

"We have effectively discarded the previous administration's nuclear dismantlement first and denuclearization first theories and shifted to a 'peace first' theory," Chung told reporters at the Unification Ministry in central Seoul.

He said the ministry's goal is now "the realization of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," redefining the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization (CVID) standard that has anchored South Korean and U.S. policy for decades.

Chung pointed to new estimates of the scale of North Korea's arsenal to make the case for urgency.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's 2026 Yearbook, released in June, put North Korea's assembled warheads at 60, up from 50 a year earlier, and said Pyongyang holds enough fissile material for up to 90.

Chung argued that holding denuclearization as a precondition for talks is no longer realistic.

"Dialogue has been cut off for seven years," Chung said. "Put denuclearization-first at the entrance to talks, and the door won't open."

Chung argued the sequencing shift reflects a broader retreat from denuclearization-first thinking among major powers, saying "even the superpowers — the United States and China — have effectively abandoned that doctrine."

He pointed to Victor Cha, the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Korea Chair, whom he described as a hawkish voice on North Korea, and argued that past South Korean governments' insistence on it "was, in large part, for domestic political purposes."

Cha argued in an essay in the May issue of Foreign Affairs that denuclearization is now "a distant objective" and called for a "cold peace" with Pyongyang.

Chung added that President Lee Jae Myung has personally made the case for a freeze-first approach to U.S. President Donald Trump, raising it at a Group of 7 dinner.

The freeze-first shift comes packaged with a broader framework Chung has called "two peaceful states pursuing unification" — Seoul's answer to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's declaration that inter-Korean relations should be treated as "hostile two states."

To explain it, Chung reached for a concept from the seventh-century Buddhist monk Wonhyo — "not-one, not-two" — signifying two separate states that nonetheless remain inherently connected toward eventual unification.

Beyond high-level security strategy, the ministry is pursuing broader perceptual and social reforms.

Chung urged news organizations to retire the term North Korean defector, or talbukmin, in favor of bukhyangmin — meaning people whose home region is in the North — arguing the older term carries connotations of "stigma and exclusion."

He also detailed changes at Hanawon, the state resettlement center long associated with a controlled, quasi-detention setting.

Barbed wire has been removed, he said, and trainees now use smartphones.

Graduates starting this month will take home new phones dubbed "Yang Han-jong phones," named for a businessperson with roots in the North who donated 1 billion won ($725,000) to support the resettlement of newcomers.

BY SEO JI-EUN   [[email protected]]