UN arms experts swooped in on a newly declared site near Baghdad yesterday, saying it was among locations disclosed by Iraq in its mammoth weapons declaration.
Inspections resumed across Iraq a day after the US threatened possible nuclear retaliation if its forces or allies were attacked with doomsday weapons.
Teams of inspectors, escorted by Iraqi officials, drove from their Baghdad headquarters to five sites as their hunt for Iraq's alleged banned arsenal picked up pace in its third week.
One team arrived at the Kara-mah complex in Taji, 10km north of Baghdad.
"The site we are going to this morning is one of the new sites that was given in the declaration and we need your help to get us there at this point," William Jolley, head of one UN inspection team, told an accompanying Iraqi official.
Jolley was speaking within earshot of reporters outside a walled compound called the "Strategic Storage Unit," according to a sign at the entrance, operated by Karamah Public Company.
The inspectors parked one of their white vehicles across the main gate to block access while they were inside. Taji houses complexes suspected of past involvement in Iraq's biological warfare and ballistic missile programs.
UN experts checked four other locations: Ibn Sina nuclear site in Tarmiya 30km northwest of Baghdad, Tuweitha nuclear site20km south of Baghdad, a biological site at Amriyah 45km to the southwest, and Fateh chemical site on the city's outskirts.
Inspectors who had spent the night at a phosphate facility at al-Qaem, 400km northwest of Baghdad -- said to have produced refined uranium ore -- resumed work yesterday.
Al-Qaem is the furthest the inspectors have travelled from Baghdad.
The US raised the temperature in its confrontation with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, saying in a strategy document that it could even go nuclear if such weapons were used against its forces or its allies.
"The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force -- including through resort to all our options -- to the use of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies," the document said.
US officials said the passage on nuclear deterrence was not a change in policy but had been added to the document, the first update since 1993, to put more emphasis on the role of deterrence against a weapons of mass destruction attack.
Iraq accused the US of looking for an excuse for war by seizing control from the UN of distribution of the 12,000-page declaration of Baghdad's weapons programs.
The White House said the accusation was "laughable," but Security Council members such as Norway and Syria -- who will be given only an edited copy of the document -- said they were being treated as second-class powers.
At the UN, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said he hoped to have an assessment of the Iraqi arms declaration next week after distributing an edited version of the document to the full 15-member Security Council.
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