North, South Korean leaders pledge to sign peace treaty, complete denuclearisation

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced Friday that starting May 1 they will suspend all loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts the countries have been blaring at each other across their heavily-armed border.

The historic meeting will focus on the North’s recent indications it could be willing to give up its nuclear weapons.

Choi Gwang-chun, who runs a restaurant in the South Korean town of Daejeon, is offering a special “unification liquor” cocktail made of Taedong beer, named after a North Korean river, and South Korean Halla soju, a distilled rice spirit named after a South Korean mountain.

In the war, North Korea sought by force to reunite the Korean nation, divided at the 38th parallel into a Soviet-occupied north and a US-occupied south at the conclusion of World War II. The outcomes of this meeting will likely help determine the possible future meeting with Donald Trump and Kim.

He tweeted: “KOREAN WAR TO END!”

“We think that’s a great thing for the world”, Trump said.

North Korea has placed its nukes up for negotiations. “Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher process!”

North Korea claims it has already risen to that level.

Kim stressed the need for an agreement that will not collapse.

There was no reference to Kim Il Sung’s first wife before her death and for many years there was no mention at all of his second wife, Lankov said.

South Korea said the leaders held “sincere and candid” talks on denuclearisation and are working on the wording of a joint statement to be delivered after dinner on Friday evening.

The two previous Korean summits in 2000 and 2007, both of them in Pyongyang, also ended with displays of affection and similar pledges, but the agreements ultimately came to naught.

The two countries will hold talks with the United States and China, and South Korean President Moon Jae-In will visit Pyyongyang later this year.

She was part of a North Korean delegation to the February’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, becoming the first member of the North’s ruling Kim family to visit South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

The two were handed flowers by two South Korean children, residents of a village situated in the demilitarized zone, and met on a red carpet by a South Korean honor guard in historical costumes playing traditional music.

The leaders then ventured into the South’s Peace House, which had been outfitted head to toe in custom furniture and artwork heavy with symbolism.

Thousands of journalists were kept in a huge conference centre well away from the summit, except for a small group of tightly-controlled pool reporters at the border. They both did, and then returned to the South together, hands held.

According to Yoon, the two leaders were discussing how they got to the summit when Kim said: “I was told that you used to be unable to get a good night’s sleep, being awakened in the wee hours of the morning because you had to attend the National Security Council meetings because of us”.

Back in 1984, a 22-year-old Soviet tourist bolted from North to South at Panmunjom, triggering a gun battle in which three pursuing North Korean soldiers were killed, along with a Southern trooper, although defector Vasily Matuzok was unharmed. Kim returned to his country in a black limousine that crossed the inter-Korean border while surrounded by almost a dozen North Korean guards. Mr Kim even reportedly joked about not interrupting President Moon’s sleep by waking him up early with his missile tests.

At the start of the meeting in the morning, which lasted from 10:15 a.m.to 11:55 a.m., Moon and Kim Jong-un expressed hopes for substantial results.

Moon traveled to the meeting in a large motorcade, stopping briefly to greet dozens of summit supporters waving South Korean flags near the presidential Blue House in Seoul.

Nuclear weapons are the top talking point of Friday’s summit.

The White House said it was hopeful that the talks between the two Korean leaders would make progress towards peace and prosperity.

It follows months of heightened tensions between the USA, its ally South Korea and the North, with Trump and Kim engaging in tit-for-tat threats that some feared would end in nuclear war.