Pyongyang calls rare direct talks with South Korea

North and South Korea are tomorrow to hold rare direct talks, offering hopes of a detente that could defuse tensions that have worsened since Pyongyang's launch of a long-range rocket earlier this month.

North Korea requested the meeting but has not specified the core issue it sought to discuss, saying only that it wanted to deliver an “important message”.

Tensions on the peninsula are at their highest for a decade after Pyongyang riled the United Nations by firing a long-range rocket over Japan, expelling nuclear inspectors and vowing to restart a reactor that makes weapons-grade plutonium.

The meeting will be in Kaesong, a South Korean investment enclave inside North Korea. Pyongyang says it also wants to discuss the trade zone and the choice of venue has led some in the South Korean media to speculate its neighbour could use a detained South Korean worker at Kaesong, arrested three weeks ago on charges of encouraging defection, as leverage. North Korea also holds two US journalists arrested filming near the Chinese border.

The communist state's offer of dialogue has wrong-footed Lee Myung-bak, the conservative South Korean president. He postponed an announcement due at the weekend that Seoul would join the Proliferation Security Initiative, a US-led effort to limit the spread of weapons of mass destruction.