A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman told the official Korean Central News Agency late Tuesday that Pyongyang would impose the freeze only after it received rewards.

These would include its removal from a US list of nations accused of sponsoring terrorism and the resumption of suspended US oil deliveries.

Bush, following talks Tuesday with China's Premier Wen Jiabao at the White House, gave a blunt rebuff to the proposal.

"The goal of the United States is not for a freeze of the nuclear program; the goal is to dismantle a nuclear weapons program in a verifiable and irreversible way," he said, adding "that is a clear message that we are sending to the North Koreans."

Officials in Seoul were closely examining the statement from Pyongyang which South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan said reflected long-standing North Korean demands.

"We believe North Korea's demands reflect in part those already made during three-way talks in April and the first six-way talks in August," he said.

Yoon said South Korea was still pushing for a new round of six-way talks this year, bringing together the two Koreas, China, Japan, the United States and Russia.

China hosted the first round of talks in Beijing in August that failed to break the impasse triggered in October last year when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to running an enriched uranium program in violation of a 1994 nuclear freeze accord.

After the United States suspended fuel oil deliveries in retaliation, North Korea kicked out international monitors from its nuclear complex at Yongbyon north of Pyongyang, withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and said it had nuclear weapons and was reprocessing spent fuel to build more.

Analysts in Seoul said the freeze offer referred only to the plutonium-producing plant at Yongbyon, mothballed under the now-defunct 1994 Agreed Framework, and ignored the uranium program that triggered the current crisis.

"North Korea is talking about Yongbyon only," said Kim Sung-Han of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and National Security here. "They have never admitted to the uranium program."

The North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said Pyongyang was deeply disappointed by the US attitude after Washington rejected a North Korean proposal last week for "simultaneous" measures to be agreed on at a new round of talks.

Judging that proposal too favourable to the Stalinist state, Japan, South Korea and the United States last week drafted their own counter-proposal for the talks that was handed to Chinese officials in Beijing on Monday and was to be passed on to North Korea.

Yoon indicated that the latest North Korean demands were not in response to the new US-backed proposals.

"I don't think the proposal drafted by South Korea, the United States and Japan has yet been conveyed to North Korea," he said.

In recent weeks North Korea has been urging the United States to accept the principle of "simultaneous actions" as a framework for resolving the standoff.

Under its proposals, North Korea would offer to renounce nuclear weapons development, to allow inspections, and eventually, to scrap its nuclear facilities. In return, it has asked for a security guarantee from the United States, economic aid and diplomatic relations.

The US-backed counterproposal focuses on "coordinated steps," according to a senior South Korean official. Washington is maintaining a central demand that North Korea scrap its nuclear programs in a verifiable manner, as other "coordinated" steps, including a written security guarantee, are made.

WAR.WIRE