SOUTH KOREA has softened its stance on North Korea’s nuclear programme, asking for a resumption of six-way talks aimed at disarming the peninsula.

The Korea Times quotes Southern president Lee Myung-bak as hoping that concerns over North Korea’s nuclear programme could be settled next year if six-way talks – between the two Korean nations and Russia, China, Japan and the US – were to resume.

His remarks, which also called for greater diplomatic ties with China and Russia, have been interpreted as a significant contrast to earlier positions in which Lee had refused to back the resumption of the talks.

The six-party talks had begun in 2003 but made little progress in encouraging North Korea to scale down its arms programme until 2007; Pyongyang withdrew from the talks in April 2009, however, and has continued its armament programme since.

Lee also called for further dialogue with the North to try and ease the recent growing tension between the two nations, after receiving new policy reports from his foreign and reunification ministries, the Financial Times adds.

BusinessWeek adds that the defence ministry, however, has continued to pledge an “active deterrence” strategy to remove the Northern nuclear threat, however.

China has labelled South Korea’s plans ‘provocative’, however, in an editorial of a sister paper to the official Communist Party publication People’s Daily.

“Closely watching dynamics on the peninsula, we are able to see that South Korea’s declarations about its reunification plan have created more tensions in the region,” the editorial read.

An editorial in North Korea’s own state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said the US and South Korea should not “misjudge the will of the DPRK [North Korea] to preserve peace, “but immediately stop their reckless military provocations aimed at screwing up the tension on the Korean Peninsula.”