Bush also poured praise on China's President Hu Jintao, who enticed the North Koreans to the table, in a boon for once testy relations between Beijing and the White House.

Clearly satisfied that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appeared to blink first in diplomatic tussle over the format for talks, Bush explained why he had refused to talk to North Korea one-on-one.

"We were very concerned about trying to enter into a bilateral agreement with Kim Jong Il because of the fact that he didn't tell the truth to previous administrations," he told reporters ushered into a cabinet meeting.

"So we took a new tack ... to engage China in the process so that there is more than one voice speaking to Mr. Kim Jong Il," Bush said, after Pyongyang signalled it was ready to join talks with the United States, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

Bush has argued that the showdown concerns the whole of Asia, and cannot be solved simply with a Washington-Pyongyang dialogue.

"In the past it was the lone voice of the United States speaking clearly about this; now we'll have other parties who have got a vested interest in peace on the Korean Peninsula," Bush said.

He added that he hoped a plethora of voices would be able to convince Kim to verifiably dismantle his nuclear weapons programs which sparked the crisis in October.

"We're optimistic that that can happen."

After months of diplomatic haggling over the format of talks, North Korea said Friday that the six-way forum had been its idea, after it had been told by the United States through a third party that one-on-one talks could take place in a multilateral setting.

"There is always the opportunity during these meetings for North Korea or any other party to talk directly to another party while these meetings are going on," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, shedding light on the compromise which smoothed Pyongyang's path to joining the talks.

Other diplomatic sources had previously said that the United States had proposed that a previous three-party forum with China and North Korea in April could quickly be expanded into six-way talks.

The US side on Friday declined to offer dates or venues for the dialogue, though Beijing is likely to be at the top of the list.

A senior State Department official said on Thursday that the talks could take place in September or sooner.

Among senior Bush administration officials there was clearly satisfaction that a much criticised policy towards Pyongyang appeared to be bearing fruit.

"The resolve that the (US, South Korean and Japanese) governments showed, all three of them, in telling the North Koreans through China ... that there wouldn't be substantive negotiations unless South Korea and Japan were in the room and at the table has paid off," said top US arms negotiator John Bolton during a visit to Tokyo.

McClellan told reporters that North Korea had "agreed to the multilateral approach that we long sought."

US officials have made frequent verbal attacks on North Korea : Bush added it to his "axis of evil" and as recently as this week Bolton said the lives of North Koreans under Kim were "hellish."

Bush has branded Pyongyang's demand for two-way talks on US demands that it cease developing nuclear weapons as "blackmail" and refused to offer a payoff for an end to the programs.

He has however told North Korea, that should it verifiably dismantle the programs it could expect US economic and diplomatic aid, though has not hidden his distaste for Kim.

The nuclear crisis erupted in October when Washington revealed that Pyongyang had broken the 1994 accord and was running a nuclear program based on enriched uranium.

Ratcheting up tension, North Korea kicked out UN nuclear inspectors late last year and then withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has since claimed it has reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods after reopening its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, frozen under the 1994 pact.

Washington believes North Korea extracted enough weapons-grade plutonium for about two nuclear bombs before it froze its Yongbyon plant. Reprocessing the fuel rods could provide enough additional material for around six bombs within months, according to analysts.

WAR.WIRE