Top aides to the leaders of North and South Korea are meeting at the Panmunjom truce village straddling their border raising hopes for an end to a standoff that put the two sides on the brink of armed conflict.
The meeting is taking place before North Korea's previously set ultimatum demanding that the South halt its loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the border or face military action.
Tension on the Korean peninsula has been running high since an exchange of artillery fire on Thursday, prompting calls for calm from the United Nations, the United States and the North's lone major ally, China.
South Korea's military remained on high alert despite the announced talks, a defence ministry official said.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye's national security adviser and unification minister will meet Hwang Pyong So, the top military aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and a senior official who handles inter-Korean affairs at 6pm Seoul time (10am Irish time)
"The South and the North agreed to hold contact related to the ongoing situation in South-North relations," Kim Kyou-hyun, the presidential Blue House's deputy national security adviser, said in a televised briefing.
Pyongyang made an initial proposal yesterday for a meeting,and Seoul made a revised proposal on today seeking Mr Hwang's attendance, Mr Kim said.
"They need to come up with some sort of an agreement where both sides have saved face. That would be the trick," said James Kim, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.
"North Korea will probably demand that the broadcasts be cut, and they may even come to an impasse on that issue."
North Korea, technically still at war with the South after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, had declared a "quasi-state of war" in front-line areas and set the deadline for Seoul to halt the broadcasts from loudspeakers placed along the border.
"The situation on the Korean peninsula is now inching close to the brink of a war due to the reckless provocations made by the south Korean military war hawks," the North's KCNA news agency said earlier.
Seoul had said it would continue the broadcasts unless the North accepted responsibility for landmine explosions this month in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that wounded two South Korean soldiers. Pyongyang denies it planted the mines.
South Korean Vice Defence Minister Baek Seung-joo said yesterday his government expected North Korea to fire at some of the 11 sites where Seoul has set up loudspeakers.
The United States, which has 28,500 military personnel based in South Korea, said on Friday it had resumed its annual joint military exercises there after a temporary halt to coordinate with Seoul over the shelling from North Korea.
The drills, code-named Ulchi Freedom Guardian, began on Monday and run until next Friday. North Korea regularly condemns the manoeuvres as a preparation for war.
Four South Korean and four US fighter jets flew in a joint sortie over the South today, an official at the South's office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said by telephone, as thousands of South Korean villagers living near the border were evacuated into shelters.
