The allies' biggest-ever joint manoeuvre, which saw jet fighters thunder through the sky above a US carrier battle group, began days after Pyongyang stunned the world with a deadly artillery strike on a South Korean island.

"These exercises are meaningful as they demonstrate a firm commitment of the South Korea-US alliance that the allies will sternly respond to any North Korean provocation," said a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff senior official.

"We have been in consultations with the US to carry out several rounds of joint military drills to deal with limited provocations by the enemy," said Colonel Kim Young-Cheol, adding that no dates had been set, the Yonhap news agency reported.

China -- strongly opposed to the display of allied firepower in the Yellow Sea, which it views as its backyard -- called for all parties involved in the Korean peninsula crisis to avoid actions that "inflame the situation".

"The parties concerned should keep calm and exercise restraint and work to bring the situation back onto the track of dialogue and negotiation," the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi as saying.

He also said China, North Korea's major ally, "decides its position based on the merits of each case and does not seek to protect any side".

The drills went off without incident after the North had warned that the four-day exercises brought the Koreas closer to "the brink of war".

Still, South Korea was taking no chances and was deploying surface-to-air missiles on Yeonpyeong island, where four people were killed in North Korea's attack last week, Yonhap reported Wednesday, citing an unnamed military source.

The regime of Kim Jong-Il, which has staged two atomic bomb tests since 2006, ramped up tensions when it boasted Tuesday about a new nuclear facility that experts say could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium.

With the Korean peninsula plunged into its worst crisis in years, diplomats at the United Nations and elsewhere struggled to find common ground on whether to punish Pyongyang or seek to engage it in new talks.

China has blocked attempts at a UN Security Council condemnation of North Korea's actions, several diplomats said.

"Council talks have come to a standstill," one said. "It is now very likely that the Security Council will do nothing about North Korea."

Beijing has instead proposed that the six parties to long-stalled North Korean denuclearisation talks -- the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan -- hold an emergency meeting on the crisis.

But Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have been cool to the proposal or rejected it.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan reconfirmed their united stand in talks on the sidelines of a Kazakhstan summit, said the foreign ministry in Seoul.

"As for the resumption of six-party talks, the two shared the view that the North must show a responsible attitude toward its provocative acts and prove its willingness for denuclearization with actions and thus create favourable atmosphere for the resumption of the talks," the official said.

Shuttle diplomacy was going on elsewhere.

Envoys from North Korea and Japan were visiting Beijing, China's top foreign policy official Dai Bingguo was expected to head to North Korea this week, and Russia's deputy nuclear envoy was headed for Seoul.

The spike in tensions comes as North Korea's Kim, 68, is thought to be in poor health and readying to hand over power to his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un, who two months ago assumed a top military post at the age of 27.

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