SEOUL, South Korea - President Bush sought to assure South Korea yesterday that he is not rushing toward military confrontation with communist North Korea, which he has branded part of "an axis of evil."

Bush was to visit the heavily guarded demilitarized zone dividing the Korean peninsula on today (late yesterday EST) and was to renew an offer to negotiate with North Korea.

Bush's provocative description of North Korea has caused unease in Asia. The president was to discuss his views with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung at the Blue House, the official residence named for its ceramic roof tiles.

After their talks, the two were heading to the DMZ, the 21/2-mile-wide, 151-mile-long border strewn with mines and guarded by a total of nearly 2 million troops on the two sides. The United States has stationed 37,000 troops in South Korea.

Bush planned to peer across the border at a desolate winter landscape dotted with military observation posts and propaganda signs.

The near-finished text of Bush's address to be delivered near the DMZ did not mention the "axis of evil" label he slapped on North Korea, Iran and Iraq during his State of the Union address.

Adviser Karen Hughes denied that Bush was backing off his statement and said that he would forcefully reiterate his contention that North Korea is one of the world's most dangerous and repressive regimes.

"We seek a region in which demilitarized zones and missile batteries no longer separate people with a common heritage and a common future," Bush said yesterday.

In a gesture of comity, the president intended to offer unconditional talks to North Korea.

The day's events were designed to ease concerns among U.S. allies, including some South Koreans, that America is moving toward a military clash with North Korea.

Bush's warnings clashed with the policies of Kim, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for a four-year quest to soften relations with his northern neighbor. The South Korean believes that gestures of friendship can ease tensions on the peninsula and reduce the prospects for war.

North Korea continued to accuse Bush of war mongering.

"If the U.S. imperialists and Japanese reactionaries should provoke the second Korean War, to the end our military and people will attack them with 100 times to 1,000 times of revenge," Radio Pyongyang said in a commentary monitored by the Radiopress agency in Tokyo.

Sandy Berger, national security director for President Clinton, said the stop would be tricky for Bush. He said Bush must square "the tough-nose rhetoric of the State of the Union with the different position of the South Koreans while being at the DMZ and talking to troops. What's the posture here? What is the mix between firmness and openness?"

Bush hoped to answer those questions during the speech at the Dorasan Train Station, which is less than one-third of a mile from the DMZ and is the last stop on the South Korean side of the Unification Railway.

South Korea completed its tracks in February under a June 2000 agreement to reconnect the peninsula through rail and highway. North Korea has yet to begin construction, making the project in the south a dead end - and a symbol of North-South relations.

On one side of the border, "we've got people starving to death, because a nation chooses to build weapons of mass destruction. And on the other side there's freedom," Bush said this week.

The president was bringing to the DMZ a satellite photo of nighttime light on the Korean peninsula, showing the highly developed South awash in blots of light and only two or three pinpricks of white in the North, the largest in the Pyongyang capital.

Bush sees the photo as proof of the "light and opportunity that comes with freedom and the dark that comes with a regime that's repressive and holds its own people back," Hughes said.

The South Korean president has not offered judgments about Bush's State of the Union comments. However, some in South Korea note that North Korea has seemed less interested in negotiations since Bush took office 13 months ago.

Bush says he favors a North-South dialogue and is willing to open talks with Pyongyang himself.

"We have no conditions on dialogue with North Korea," he said.

But he came to the position slowly, after initially scuttling a Clinton administration initiative to reach out to North Korea.