North Korea has agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor within 60 days and eventually dismantle its entire atomic weapons programme, in an historic deal reached this morning.

Under the agreement with the United States and five other nations, the communist country will receive initial aid equal to 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil for shutting down and sealing its main nuclear reactor and related facilities at Yongbyon, north of the capital, and a further 950,000 tonnes in aid for irreversibly disabling the reactor. The energy aid deal equates to $300 million (£154 million), according to the news agency Reuters.

Japan will not provide any energy aid under the deal unless progress is made in resolving the fate of Japanese citizens abducted decades ago, but Tokyo will still support the agreed-to framework, Shinzo Abe, the country's Prime Minister, has said.

If Pyongyang goes through with its promises, it will be the first moves the communist regime has made to scale back its atomic development, after more that three years of negotiations marked by delays and deadlock, which included North Korea's first nuclear test explosion in October.

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The policy was not to reward North Korea for bad behaviour, but the aid being given is equivalent to $330 million, which is some reward

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However, the US was refusing to get carried away with the deal, claiming the proof would be in whether North Korea - which has breached nuclear understandings in the past - sticks to it. Condoleezza Rice this afternoon welcomed the agreement as a “good beginning,” but cautioned that it was “not the end of the story."

The US Secretary of State added that today’s proceedings should serve as a memo to Iran – which has antagonised the West over its nuclear ambitions - that international diplomacy could achieve results.

“Why should it not be seen as a message to Iran that the international community is able to bring together its resources, particularly when regionally affected states work together and that the strong diplomacy ... has finally achieved results?” she said in Washington.

The deal stipulates that North Korea and America will embark on negotiations aimed at resolving their historic disputes and restarting full diplomatic relations.

The US will also begin the process of removing North Korea from its current designation as a terror-sponsoring state, and will move towards ending American trade sanctions.

After the initial 60 days, foreign ministers from all countries at the talks - China, Japan, Russia, the United States and North and South Korea - will meet again to assess how the deal is progressing.

However, Christopher Hill, the US Assistant Secretary of State and the main US nuclear envoy at the talks, also stressed that the agreement was just the start of the disarmament process.

“This is only the end of the beginning of the process (to disarm North Korea). We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Meanwhile John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, told the CNN news station that the agreement set a bad precedent. He said that North Korea should not be rewarded with "massive shipments of heavy fuel oil" for only partially dismantling its nuclear arsenal.

"It sends exactly the wrong signal to would-be proliferators around the world," he said.

Britain welcomed the agreement, with a Foreign Office statement saying: "We welcome the positive outcome to this latest round of the six-party talks."

The Korean peninsula has remained in a state of war for more than a half-century since the Korean War ended in a 1953 ceasefire, and a string of attempts by the international community to reach a deal with communist North Korea, which was known to have been producing nuclear weapons, have failed over the last few years.

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