The leaders of North and South Korea pledged today to seek talks with China and the United States to formally end the 1950-1953 Korean War.
"North and South Korea shared the view they must end the current armistice and build a permanent peace regime," South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il said at the end of their three-day meeting in Pyongyang.
The agreement came at the end of only the second summit between the divided Koreas whose war ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pose for pictures before the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang
The agreement also called for setting up the first regular freight train service since the war, meetings of ministers and defence officials as well as establishing a co-operation zone around a contested sea border on the west of the peninsula.
The armistice that concluded their war was signed in 1953 by China, North Korea and US-led United Nations forces, but not by South Korea.
US President George W. Bush has said he can discuss a peace treaty once the North scraps its nuclear weapons programme.
China announced last night that North Korea had agreed with regional powers to disable its nuclear facilities - a source of atomic weapons material - by the end of the year, a major step in normalising relations with the outside world.
The two Koreas today agreed to work together to implement that pact.