North and South Korea said today they had agreed to pursue "appropriate dialogue" to resolve the dispute over the communist North's nuclear weapons programmes.
"South Korea and North Korea will resolve the nuclear issue peacefully through appropriate dialogue," said a statement issued after three days of ministerial talks in Seoul.
"This is necessary to maintain peace and security on the Korean peninsula," said the first clause of the six-point statement that also pledged reunions of divided families and new rounds of ministerial and economic talks in coming months.
The vague nuclear statement came after marathon overnight negotiations that failed to bridge the gap between Seoul and Pyongyang. Seoul wanted multilateral talks involving the Koreas, the United States, Japan and China, while Pyongyang insisted on direct one-to-one talks with the United States.
Although the three-day talks failed to produce a clear solution, Seoul looks satisfied with the pace of what they called "progress."
"This is a step forward," Mr Kim Chong-ro, a Unification Ministry spokesman, said. "We can interpret the expression 'appropriate talks' as the possibility that North Korea is tilting toward the acceptance of multilateral talks."
At the Seoul talks, the North said it wanted a peaceful resolution to the nuclear crisis. At the same time, it warned it was willing to go to war if the United States resorted to the use of force.
South Korea's National Intelligence Service said on Wednesday that North Korea had recently reprocessed a small number of its estimated 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and had also tested devices used to trigger atomic explosions.
The report prompted South Korean politicians of all parties to call on the government to cut off all cash flows to North Korea amid suspicions Pyongyang was using Seoul's aid to build nuclear weapons.