MOSCOW, July 19 -- In an announcement intended to remove the prime rationale for an American missile defense plan, Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, said today that North Korea had offered to abandon its missile program if other nations would provide it with rockets to launch satellites into space.

Mr. Putin announced the offer after a meeting in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, with that country's leader, Kim Jong Il. The visit was a first for a Russian president and was part of an intensive round of Asian diplomacy aimed at mobilizing opposition to the American antimissile plan. On Tuesday, Mr. Putin signed a joint statement with the Chinese denouncing the United States' plans for a missile defense.

The United States responded to the announcement today by saying it hoped to clarify the North Korean offer when Mr. Putin meets Western leaders at a meeting of the world's leading industrial countries in Okinawa, Japan, starting Friday.

A senior American official said Washington could not agree to the offer if it meant putting Western missile technology in North Korean hands. But he said the United States would be willing to explore an arrangement in which North Korea's satellites would be brought to other nations to be launched into space.

After meeting with Mr. Kim, Mr. Putin implied that North Korea had offered to give up the testing, development and production of missiles. What North Korea is seeking in return was not entirely clear, but Mr. Putin suggested that it was not just launch services that would be provided by other nations, but foreign rocket boosters that would be brought to North Korea so that it could launch satellites into space.

Or, as Mr. Putin put it, the North Korean leader "voiced an idea under which North Korea is even prepared to use exclusively the rocket equipment of other countries for peaceful space research if they offered it."

"One should expect that countries that assert the D.P.R.K. poses a threat to them would support this project," Mr. Putin added, using the abbreviation for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the formal name of North Korea.

The United States has repeatedly urged North Korea to stop the development, production and sale of missiles. North Korea has halted flight tests as part of an understanding with Washington, but has not previously suggested that it might stop making missiles.

Leon V. Sigal, a specialist on northeast Asia at the Social Science Research Council in New York, said the North Korean offer signaled a willingness to reach an accommodation with the United States. "North Korea's basic strategy is to use its missile program to move its relationship with the United States away from one of hostility," he said.

North Korea's missile offer, Mr. Sigal noted, appeared to be an echo of the nuclear deal North Korea had struck previously with the Clinton administration.

Under that arrangement, North Korea agreed to shut down its plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon, which had been a major worry for Western experts who feared the plutonium was being used for nuclear bombs. In return, the West agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors, which would supply electricity but are far less useful for making nuclear weapons.

But Kurt Campbell, a former senior Pentagon official with responsibility for Asia and the Pacific, doubted the West would provide rocket boosters to North Korea.

"The technology would be transferable," he said. "Japan would be anxious, and there is still much that we don't understand about what is going on in North Korea."

The North Korean offer comes at a critical time. The United States is nearing a decision on whether to build a missile defense system. It is engaged in sensitive talks with Pyongyang about its missile program. And relations have begun to thaw on the Korean peninsula.

The atmosphere in recent missile talks between the United States and North Korea was businesslike, although there was no breakthrough. The Clinton administration has sought to persuade North Korea to abandon its sale of missile technology, offering assistance in agriculture and public health in return.

North Korea, in contrast, has demanded $1 billion a year for stopping missile exports. And it has insisted that it will continue to develop missiles for its own defense, a stance that seemed at variance with the proposal announced today.

The United States became especially concerned about North Korea after Pyongyang tried to launch a satellite into orbit in August 1998 using a three-stage Taepo Dong-1 missile. Though the satellite never went into orbit, North Korea's use of a three-stage missile caught American intelligence officials by surprise. It was a sign that North Korea's missile program was moving along more quickly than American officials had suspected.

More recently, North Korea has abandoned work on the Taepo Dong-1 in favor of a newer Taepo Dong-2 missile.

American intelligence has judged that if North Korea did violate the test moratorium it might be able to develop in a matter of months a rudimentary missile capable of reaching the United States.

The deeper issue is what North Korea might do with such a weapon. Some American experts fear that North Korea could use it to threaten the United States in a crisis. North Korea is believed to have nuclear material for two warheads at most, compared with 6,000 for the United States. The experts argue that North Korea is so unpredictable that it might threaten a strike anyway.

Other specialists, however, say North Korea has shown a healthy respect for the United States military might. It has concluded an accord to freeze its nuclear program and has suspended missile test flights. Now, they say, it may be willing to bargain away its missile program, albeit for the right price.