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Six-party talks resumed in Beijing on Thursday to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis. Nobody would oppose a genuine resolution of the deadlock and the establishment of a substantial and practical international peace framework for the Korean Peninsula.

But a careful look at the North Korean regime and its South Korea and international policies gives rise to many concerns. Foremost is a strategy for unifying the peninsula through the communization of the South. Once the core knot in a chain of knots is disentangled, the theory goes, the other knots are easily untied. On April 28, 1956, three years after the armistice, the North Korean Workers' Party at its third national convention announced six stages for peaceful unification. It has consistently pursued them over the past 50 years through Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s orders and actions by its fifth column in the South. The latest round of the six-nation talks looks worryingly like an operation to untie the last knot and nearly complete those stages.

The six stages are: a unified government to be established in a general election; turning the armistice into a firm peace by minimizing armed forces and withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea and an end to the South Korea-U.S. mutual defense treaty; “democratic principles” to be realized in the South for the achievement of peaceful unification by guaranteeing freedom of political action by political parties, social organizations and individuals; boundaries to be removed to promote peaceful unification; joint struggle against American imperialism and enemies of peaceful unification; and an international agreement to maintain peace in Korea and peaceful settlement of the Korean question. This last stage calls for convening an international conference with representatives of the two Koreas and Asian countries.

The regime has steadily been untying the six knots, particularly in the last few years. Reports have it that the U.S. is prepared to replace the armistice with a peace treaty, and that China will propose an agreement to that end. The South Korean armed forces are already being reduced. South Korea is taking back wartime operational control of its forces, which could cause the U.S. military to withdraw at any time. Once that happens, it won’t be difficult to end the Seoul-Washington mutual defense treaty. The National Security Law is in tatters. North Korea and its fifth column in the South have achieved quite a lot in their struggle against “American imperialism and the enemies of peaceful unification.” It only remains to conclude an international agreement for “peaceful resolution of the Korean question."

The basic goal of the six-party talks is to completely dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and nuclear development programs. They must not end with an international agreement, the last knot in the North's codes of action for communist unification, without achieving their basic goal. If they do, history may judge them as having brought calamity upon the Korean Peninsula.

The column was contributed by Song Dae-sung, a chief researcher at the Sejong Institute.