South Korea will remove loudspeakers that blared propaganda across the border with North Korea this week, officials said Monday, as the rivals move to follow through with their leaders' summit declaration.
During their historic meeting Friday at a Korean border village, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed to end hostile acts against each other along their tense border, establish a liaison office and resume reunions of separated families.
They also agreed to achieve a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, but failed to produce specific time frames and disarmament steps.
Seoul's Defense Ministry said it would pull back dozens of its front-line loudspeakers on Tuesday before media cameras. Ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyunsoo said Seoul expected Pyongyang to do the same.
South Korea had already turned off its loudspeakers ahead of Friday's summit talks, and North Korea responded by halting its own broadcasts.
The two Koreas had been engaged in Cold War-era psychological warfare since the North's fourth nuclear test in early 2016. Seoul began blaring anti-Pyongyang broadcasts and K-Pop songs via border loudspeakers, and Pyongyang quickly matched the South's action with its own border broadcasts and launches of balloons carrying anti-South leaflets.
Seoul's announcement came a day after it said Kim told Moon during the summit that he would shut down his country's only known nuclear testing site and allow outside experts and journalists to watch the process.
As a conciliatory gesture after the summit, North Korea also said it will move its clocks 30 minutes forward to unify with the South's time zone starting this Saturday.
The two countries on the divided peninsula have had different time zones since 2015 when the North suddenly changed its standard time to 30 minutes behind the South.
Pyongyang cited a nationalistic rationale, saying it would return the North to the time zone used before Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the peninsula to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation from Tokyo.
