Seoul: Tuesday's unprecedented US-North Korea summit could finally pave the way for the longest ceasefire in history to be replaced by a peace treaty -- formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War nearly seven decades after the guns fell silent.
The North and South remain technically at war, but US President Donald Trump said a permanent accord to end the conflict would be on the table at his historic meeting with the North's leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
Seoul announced this week it is already in three-way talks with Pyongyang and Washington for an "early" declaration that the war is over -- which could precede a full treaty that might need extensive negotiation.
The Soviet Union declared war on Japan, Korea's colonial ruler, in between the US nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and sent troops pouring into the peninsula.
Washington and Moscow agreed to divide it into two occupied zones along the 38th parallel, and with the Cold War rivals unable to agree on a path to Korean independence, the split was enshrined in 1948 with the emergence of two rival states.
Both the Communist North and the capitalist South claimed to be the legitimate government of the entire peninsula. On 25 June 1950, the North invaded the South as Kim Il Sung attempted to reunify it by force.
The Northern troops seized Seoul in three days. Multinational UN forces -- mainly American -- arrived in the South to help, but were pushed back to the Pusan Perimeter, a pocket in the southeast. A bold counter-offensive launched by UN forces commander General Douglas MacArthur recaptured Seoul via the Incheon Landing, splitting the North's forces and turning the tide.
UN units swept north, nearing the Chinese border in October before Beijing reversed the war's course again by sending hundreds of thousands of troops to aid its faltering Communist ally.
Seoul fell to them again in January 1951 and was recaptured once more two months later - the fourth time the city had changed hands.
Another two years of attrition followed as the fighting wore its way to a stalemate.