President Saddam Hussein has been trying to buy from Turkish suppliers up to 1.25 million doses of atropine, a derivative of deadly nightshade.

It has wide-ranging medical uses but also protects the body from nerve agents that can paralyse their victims and kill in as little as two minutes.

The Bush Administration detected a sharp increase in sales over recent months and has raised the issue with Turkey, a Nato ally, which has promised to investigate.

The Administration fears that Saddam could be planning to innoculate the Iraqi Army and unleash sarin gas or similar substances if he is attacked. The antidote is carried by soldiers with a syringe to inject it into the leg.

“The concern was that if they were buying large quantities of atropine, it might be because they were contemplating using nerve gas agents and they needed to have adequate supplies,” one official said.

The quantity already sold was not enough to indicate Saddam was trying to innoculate his entire army — “but the spike in sales is suggestive that Iraq might be making preparations in a certain direction and makes you ask whether he might be trying to buy large quantities elsewhere,” a second official said.

The Bush Administration declined to comment on the report of the gas antidote sales but made clear its concern. “We do not need any more proof that Saddam Hussein possesses and is willing to use chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them on his own people,” Scott McClellan, the deputy White House spokesman, said.

He said that the United States would take steps to protect its own forces if Saddam did manage to protect his men against deadly agents that the Iraqi leader used to horrific effect against Iranians and Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s.

“I can assure you that the Department of Defence is going to do everything they can to protect our troops, if they are called in to disarm Saddam Hussein,” he said.

Atropine can be sold legally to Baghdad because of its medical applications, and was excluded from a list of sensitive imports requiring extra scrutiny when United Nations sanctions were updated this year.

“Any Iraqi orders for more atropine than needed to meet normal humanitarian requirements would be of concern. They could indicate Iraqi preparation to use chemical weapons by preparing to protect their own forces from the consequences of such use,” Tara Rigler, a spokeswoan for the State Department, said.

For Kurds, the prospect of what one Kurdish official called “the beast of Baghdad” getting his hands on the nerve gas agent is very disturbing. “Yet again, the UN has let us down,” the official said.

An unclassified CIA report released last month said that Baghdad had begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents and probably had a few hundred tonnes of them, including mustard gas, sarin, cyclosarin and VX.

Atropine is a powerful defence against both sarin gas and the more powerful VX, which can be in liquid or gas form. Within a minute of exposure to high concentrations of such poisons, the victim may lose consciousness and die within just two minutes.

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