THE US: US officials have begun poring over Iraq's massive arms dossier after the United Nations handed them an uncut copy in a reversal of an earlier Security Council decision, diplomats said.
A quiet deal was struck to override a ruling on Friday of the full 15-member council, which had feared technical secrets on the manufacture of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons might pass into the wrong hands if the full document was circulated.
After weekend discussions involving UN weapons experts and diplomats of the United States and the four other permanent members of the council - Britain, France, Russia and China, all nuclear powers already - it was agreed to let the five have all 12,000 pages, diplomats said.
"The goal \ was to keep the information out of the hands of those who might be able to use the information to make bombs. But those of us who already know how wouldn't learn anything from the full document," a diplomat from a permanent council member said.
"It's already in Washington," a Bush administration official said.
US experts are expected to search for discrepancies between the disclosures made by Iraq in the 12,000-page dossier and what US intelligence believes it knows about continuing Iraqi efforts to develop banned weapons.
Iraq says the declaration it handed to the United Nations at the weekend, not yet made public, shows it has no weapons of mass destruction - an assertion which puts it on a collision course with Washington.
UN experts in New York and Vienna were also studying the dossier to judge whether it said enough to satisfy UN demands for disarmament and perhaps to avert war with the United States.
The White House will reserve judgment "until the United States is in a position to look at it thoroughly and completely and fully and thoughtfully", White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer said.
US officials however say they have their own evidence of continuing Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical programmes and insist Washington will take military action if necessary to rid Iraq of them.
A top aide to President Saddam Hussein hinted on Sunday that Iraq once came close to making a nuclear bomb. He invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to decide for itself how close.
"We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things. We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it," Mr Amir al-Saadi told journalists. "It is for the IAEA to judge how close we were," he said, adding: "If I tell you we were close, it is subjective."
Mr Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said in Vienna that this statement "was consistent with what we found between 1991 and 1998" and was no surprise to the UN agency.
Mr Fleischer said: "You need only look at the wistful way that leading Iraqi generals describe how close they came to getting nuclear weapons - that's why the United States is sceptical of Iraqi intentions."
The arms inspectors, who have resumed work in Iraq for the first time in four years, yesterday searched al-Tuweitha Nuclear Research Centre, 20 km south of Baghdad, the heart of Iraq's efforts to make nuclear weapons.
Other experts inspected a military industrial complex near Fallujah 90 km north-west of Baghdad, repeatedly investigated by the UN and bombed by Western warplanes in the 1990s as a suspected chemical weapons centre.
Asked about estimates the inspection process could take up to a year, the atomic agency director Gen Mohamed ElBaradei said in Tokyo: "I think that's accurate."
The UN ordered Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction after Baghdad's 1990 invasion of oil-rich neighbour Kuwait..
Iraq said yesterday its anti-aircraft and missile batteries fired at the US and British aircraft flying over areas in the south of the country, forcing them to return to their bases in Kuwait.
Meanwhile, three top Iraqi opposition leaders held talks in Tehran yesterday intended to salvage a long-delayed meeting of opponents of Saddam due to start in London this week.
Mr Ahmad Chalabi, head of the pro-Western Iraqi National Congress met Iran-based Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Hakim, who claims to represent Iraq's Shia Muslims, and Iraqi Kurdish leader Mr Massoud Barzani.