South, North Korea seek treaty

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s president expressed confidence North Korea will abandon its nuclear weapons after a summit with Kim Jong Il, where the two countries pledged Thursday to pursue a peace treaty and end their decades-long standoff across the world’s last Cold War frontier.

They signed an accord promising a joint effort to implement previous agreements from six-nation arms talks “for the solution of the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula.”

“Now that the highest leader of North Korea confirmed a clear commitment to the North’s nuclear dismantlement, I don’t see any problem in carrying it out,” South Korean President Ro h Moo-hyun said after what was only the second summit ever between the two longtime foes.

The Koreas said they also “agreed to closely cooperate to end military hostility and ensure peace and easing of tension on the Korean peninsula.” They “shared the view that they should end the current armistice regime and establish a permanent peace regime.”

Earlier this week, North Korea went further than ever before to scale back its nuclear ambitions by agreeing at arms talks with the U.S. and other regional powers to disable its main nuclear facilities and declare all its programs by the end of the year.

In the 54 years after an armistice ended the fratricidal Korean War, two profoundly different Koreas have evolved — a democratic South that is a world economic power buttressed by 28,000 American troops on its soil, and an impoverished, totalitarian North.