North Korea’s renunciation of reunification came like a bolt out of the blue when leader Kim Jong Un announced the decision some two years ago, summarily dispensing with the lodestar of inter-Korean policy for decades.

But new revelations suggest the DPRK began laying the groundwork for the policy change nearly two years before Kim’s now-infamous speech denouncing the South as an “enemy state.”

Earlier this year, Lee Sang-keun of the Institute for National Security Strategy, the think tank of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, disclosed at a public event that North Korea's foreign