Australia prepares for international sea drill

About 800 military and security officials will practice stopping and boarding ships this weekend in an exercise for a US-led 11-nation plan to stamp out global trade in weapons of mass destruction, the government said yesterday.

The exercise will be the first by the 11 governments that have signed up to the Proliferation Security Initiative, or PSI, proposed by US President George W. Bush in May.

Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill said Exercise Pacific Protector will take place in the Coral Sea off the northeast coast of Australia and involve Australian, US, Japanese and French personnel, ships and planes. The other seven member nations -- Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Britain -- will attend as observers.

"The aim of the exercise is to practice intercepting, boarding and searching vessels suspected of illegal trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems and related materials," Hill said in a statement.

Hill said a two-day meeting of officials from the 11 nations in Paris last week agreed to a series of sea, air and land exercises.

They also committed to change national and international laws to strengthen the policing plan, and to share intelligence on weapons movements. PSI members will distribute the guidelines to other countries and seek their cooperation.

US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton said in Paris that the PSI was not aimed at any one nation, but acknowledged North Korea was a top concern.

He said the fruits of such cooperation were apparent in Taiwan's interception in August of a North Korean-registered vessel and seizure of 158 barrels of phosphorous pentafulfide, which US officials said is a chemical weapons precursor. The ship was stopped based on US intelligence.

The exercise begins a little more than two weeks after Beijing hosted six-nation talks aimed at getting North Korea to stop its suspected nuclear-weapons programs.