Koreas bury hatchet, vow peace!

• Moon, Kim deliver good optics, pledge denuclearisation and a permanent peace treaty.

The leaders of North and South Korea vowed on Friday to seek a nuclear-free peninsula and work towards a formal end to the Korean War this year.North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in set aside a year that saw them seemingly on the verge of war. They grasped hands and strode together across the cracked concrete marking the Koreas' border. The leaders looked forward toward the possibility of a cooperative future even as they acknowledged a fraught past and the widespread scepticism.

The summit produced the spectacle of two men from nations with a deep and bitter history of acrimony grinning from ear to ear after Kim walked over the border to greet Moon, becoming the first leader of his nation to set foot on southern soil since the Korean War. Both leaders then briefly stepped together into the North and back to the South.

The summit marks a surreal, whiplash swing in relations for the countries, from nuclear threats and missile tests to intimations of peace and cooperation. Perhaps the change is best illustrated by geography: Kim and Moon's historic handshake and a later 30-minute conversation at a footbridge on the border occurred within walking distance of the spot where a North Korean soldier fled south in a hail of gunfire last year, and where North Korean soldiers killed two US soldiers with axes in 1976.