The plan was submitted at ongoing talks among US, Russia, China, the two Koreas and Japan in Beijing to resolve the nuclear crisis in the Korean peninsula.

It is seen as more flexible and realistic than a previous US demand for North Korea to first completely dismantle its nuclear weapons programs before any aid is channeled to the impoverished state.

The United States would take steps to ease North Korea's political and economic isolation if North Korea agreed to disband its nuclear arms network, President George W. Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Under the plan, North Korea would receive food and energy assistance and a multilateral security guarantee if it agrees to dismantle its plutonium and uranium weapons programs, officials said.

The US would also begin direct talks about lifting its array of economic sanctions, and knocking North Korea off its list of terrorist states.

"A good-faith action on North Korea's part would be met with a good-faith response by the other parties," McClellan said.

The plan was coordinated with North Korea's key ally, China, and US allies South Korea and Japan, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. It is not known to what extent the Russians contributed to the plan.

China had reported that North Korea had agreed during previous talks to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, Boucher said.

"We have now put forward a very practical way of achieving that, one that we think takes into account not only the need to do this in a very, you know, comprehensive, verifiable and irreversible way, but also that takes into account some of the concerns that North Korea has expressed along the way about security, about energy needs," he said.

The new plan is regarded as the first significant overture to North Korea since George W. Bush took office three years ago and placed the Stalinist state on his "axis of evil".

China, South Korea and Japan had found a previous US plan inflexible and had been in favour of incremental rewards to Pyongyang while it dismantles its nuclear arsenal.

McClellan said the fresh US proposal was based on a model in which Libya moved to rejoin the world community after agreeing in December to shelve its weapons of mass destruction programs following negotiations with Washington and London.

But he said he did not expect an immediate answer from North Korea and the other parties to the US plan at the Beijing talks.

"We expect all parties will look at it, they'll go back to their capitals and they'll discuss it," he said. "But, you know, this is a plan for moving forward on dismantlement."

North Korea has submitted its own six-point plan at the Beijing conference to end the crisis, according to Japan's Kyodo news agency, quoting unnamed conference sources.

It centered around freezing the operations of its nuclear facilities and allowing inspections, not necessarily by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the sources said.

However the report did not say if the plan would meet the basic US demand to completely dismantle the facilities.

McClellan said the parties would agree to a detailed implementation plan if North Korea accepts the basic demand.

He explained the plan required "a supervised disablement, dismantlement, elimination of all nuclear-related facilities and materials, the removal of all nuclear weapons and weapons components, centrifuge and other nuclear parts, fissile material and fuel rods, and a long-term monitoring program."

The process would involve a short preparatory period, where implementors would, as part of their effort to dismantle North Korea's nuclear arms network, disable all nuclear weapons and weapons components, he said.

It would be followed by "the permanent and verifiable dismantlement of their nuclear program," he added.

The preparatory period would last three months, a senior US official said.

WAR.WIRE