A South Korean envoy met Chinese officials today as diplomatic efforts were stepped up to defuse the growing crisis over North Korea's nuclear programme.
South Korea is hoping it can find a solution with help from China, which has said it opposes nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.
Seoul's Unification Minister, Mr Jeong Se-hyun, said a peaceful solution through dialogue must be found to the three-month-old crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons plans.
"The survival of the Korean people will depend on how the nuclear issue will play out," Mr Jeong said.
North Korea last month began reactivating a plutonium-producing nuclear complex north of Pyongyang that had been kept mothballed and under United Nations monitoring since 1994 under an agreement with the United States.
Earlier this week, Pyongyang expelled the last inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and suggested it would no longer consider itself bound by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Observers have identified an emerging split between South Korea and the United States over how to address the crisis, especially given Washington's more hard-line stance.
However, US President George W. Bush said this week the situation with the Stalinist state Washington views as part of an "axis of evil" was "not a military showdown" but a "diplomatic" one.
AFP