Santiago, Chile ? President Bush wants key allies to leave here this weekend delivering a clear message to North Korea, one of the two surviving members of his so-called axis of evil: Like it or not, I am back, and it is time to renew talks on dismantling your nuclear program.

After five months of gridlock, in which North Korea has had more time to reprocess plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods, officials say Bush will press his counterparts today in talks with the North from China, Japan, South Korea and Russia for a unified front in getting Pyongyang back to the table. In the first such major push in months, Bush is scheduled to meet privately with each leader here on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

“The private messages (to Pyongyang) should be that we talked to President Bush and he is serious about these talks, and we are, too,” said a senior State Department official here who is traveling with Secretary of State Colin Powell. The outgoing secretary of state, whose aides have been heading the U.S. effort in talks aimed at disarming Pyongyang, has been paving the way for Bush this week in meetings with foreign ministers from China, Russia and South Korea.

Getting North Korea back to the table for the six-party talks — the United States believes Pyongyang was holding out to see whether Bush would win re-election — represents the administration’s sole approach to dealing with the rogue regime.

Progress has been slow, at best, since the talks began almost 15 months ago. There was little movement until the United States put an offer on the table for the first time this June, handing Pyongyang a detailed aid package and a U.S. guarantee not to attack in exchange for a commitment to disarm and abandon its nuclear programs. But follow-up talks scheduled for September were scrapped, leading to the current stalemate.

The stakes are enormous. The top U.S. military commander in South Korea said Friday that Pyongyang might resort to selling weapons-grade plutonium from the 8,000 fuel rods to terrorists to get much-needed cash. U.S. intelligence officials believe the regime may possess two nuclear weapons already and, since 2002, could have reprocessed enough plutonium to produce as many as eight more.