As President Trump prepares for his own summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, South Korean leader Moon Jae-in said U.S. President Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the standoff with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, a South Korean official said on Monday.

Just a few short hours after the historic first crossing south of the border by Kim to meet Moon pledging to end hostilities between the two countries and work towards the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula, Reuters reports that Moon told a meeting of senior secretaries, according to a presidential Blue House official who briefed media:

“President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace.”

This follows Moon's comments in January that Trump "deserves big credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks. It could be a resulting work of the U.S.-led sanctions and pressure."

Moon’s Nobel Prize comment came in response to a congratulatory message from Lee Hee-ho, the widow of late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, in which she said Moon deserved to win the prize in recognition of his efforts, the Blue House official said.

Moon responded by saying Trump should get it.

As a reminder, in December of 2009 - less than one year after taking office, President Obama - to many people's surprise - won the Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

In 2015, Geir Lundestad - ex-secretary of the Nobel committee from 1990 to 2015, told the AP news agency that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama in 2009 failed to achieve what the committee hoped it would, its ex-secretary has said.

Mr Lundestad, writing in his memoir, Secretary of Peace, said even Mr Obama himself had been surprised. "No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama," Mr Lundestad writes. "Even many of Obama's supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," he says. "In that sense the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for".

So the question is - would the establishment-led Nobel committee ever consider President Trump for his (as Moon has said) role in bringing North- and South-Korea together for the first time in 65 years?