The UN: The Iraqi declaration on banned weapons programmes contains the names of Western companies which helped Baghdad amass a nuclear, chemical and biological arsenal.
A nine-page table of contents includes chapters on "procurements" in Iraq's nuclear programme and "relations with companies, representatives and individuals" for its chemical weapons programme.
UN officials and weapons experts said the information appeared to be old and mostly referred to the years before the Gulf war. It had been covered in earlier reports, they said.
Western states had in the past fought to prevent publication of the names of companies and people implicated, they added.
The Iraqi declaration threatens once more to bring the names to light.
The 12,000 pages and accompanying CD-roms, provides an inventory of Iraq's arms programmes.
But the contents pages, released by US diplomats yesterday, strengthened initial assessments that most of the declaration was a reprint of earlier reports to the UN about Iraq's weapons programmes. A "terminated radiation bomb project" is also mentioned - a reference to Iraqi attempts to build a "dirty bomb", in which radioactive material is dispersed by conventional explosives.
But according to Ms Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the project was in place before the Gulf war. The role, witting and unwitting, played by Western companies in helping President Saddam Hussein's regime develop its arsenal in the 1980s, has been widely reported.
But according to Mr David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, not all the names of people and companies involved were made public. "France, Germany and Britain and other European countries didn't want a massive tome to come out with all the companies and names, so in the mid-nineties it became the policy not to put them in the reports," Mr Albright said.
"It's hard to justify in terms of national security. But I suppose it can be justified in terms of avoiding national embarrassment."
Despite a security council agreement that the declaration would first be analysed by UN specialists at the weekend before being submitted to the 15 council members, Washington got the agreement of the sitting council president, Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso of Colombia, to hand the security council's copy over to US diplomats on the understanding that they would make copies.
Copies have been given only to the council's other four permanent members, Britain, France, Russia and China.
The Iraqi foreign ministry said in a statement that America's successful attempt to gain exclusive access to the document initially amounted to "unprecedented extortion in the history of the UN". The official reason for the declaration's limited distribution was that it contained sensitive information that could help rogue states or terrorists to build devastating weapons, particular nuclear arms.
However, a UN official said that there could be trepidation among the big powers over revealing the names of Baghdad's former suppliers.- (Guardian Service)