Bush demands tougher action against WMD

President George Bush demanded tougher international action to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, arguing that no more countries should be allowed to enrich or reprocess nuclear fuel.

In what aides billed a major speech, Mr Bush for the first time publicly accused the network set up by the renegade Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan of supplying North Korea with centrifuge technology to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and of helping the nuclear ambitions of Iran and Libya. Mr Bush also deliberately singled out for praise the role of the CIA in exposing the network which, he claimed, gave the US additional leverage on Libya to persuade it to renounce its own WMD ambitions.

Yesterday's topic and the President's highlighting of a US intelligence success had heavy political undertones, presenting Mr Bush in his preferred guise of "war president", and enabling him to switch the focus from Iraq and the intelligence debacle which helped produce last March's invasion of the country. Mr Bush insisted that international efforts thus far to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction had been neither broad nor effective enough, and that the US would act on its own if necessary to do so.

Mr Bush said: "The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons. Terrorists and terrorist states are in a race for weapons of mass murder, a race they must lose."

America, he declared, "will not permit the terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons".

In particular, Mr Bush demanded that the United Nations act to close the loophole whereby countries such as Iran were able to import equipment that helped them in the development of nuclear weapons by pretending it was exclusively for civilian purposes.

Mr Bush called on all members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 40 nations that sell most nuclear technology, to agree not to sell equipment to any country not already equipped to make nuclear fuel. "The world's leading nuclear exporters should ensure that states have reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors so long as those states renounce enrichment and reprocessing," he said.

Not for the first time, the President singled out the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog organisation, for special criticism. He urged the IAEA to set up a special committee to focus on safeguards and verification and ensure that nations comply with international obligations. He also complained that nations such as Iran, which are suspected of nuclear proliferation, had been allowed to sit on the IAEA board of governors. "Those actively breaking the rules should not be entrusted with enforcing the rules," the President said.

The agency is seen as ineffective by many in the Bush administration who cite its failure to stop weapons programmes in Libya, North Korea and other countries. But the IAEA's assessment of Iraq's virtually non-existent nuclear activities proved a lot closer to the mark than the assertionsDick Cheney, the Vice-President, and others used to justify the war.