Unification support falls in S Korea as talks stall

Ever more South Koreans prefer peaceful co-existence with the nuclear-armed North to reunification of the peninsula, a survey found Monday.

Despite sharing a common language and ethnicity and centuries of history, North and South Korea have become radically different societies in recent decades.

Ruled with an iron grip by three generations of the Kim family, the North has turned itself into a nuclear power -- at the cost of international isolation -- while the South has embraced democracy and risen to become the world's 11th-largest economy.

The South's President Moon Jae-in regularly affirms unification as an eventual goal, but the picture in his country is far more nuanced, the survey by Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) showed.

A total of 65.9 percent of South Koreans saw unification as necessary, it said, down from 70.7 percent last year as inter-Korean engagement and nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington stall.

But when offered an alternative, 49.5 .