With war looming, General Amer al-Saadi, President Saddam Hussein’s scientific adviser, said Iraq’s declaration of its arms programmes was “accurate, comprehensive and truthful”. Addressing Washington and London, who continued to brush aside the Iraqi dossier as untruthful, General al-Saadi told those who professed to have evidence to the contrary, to “come forth with it”.

He also denied that there was any new evidence on the chemical and biological programmes that Iraq claimed to have ended abruptly after the 1991 Gulf War.

Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, had demanded convincing evidence of their destruction, saying that “mustard gas is not marmalade”, and would not be done away with without records.

General al-Saadi confirmed that Iraq had pursued a nuclear programme before the Gulf War, but declined to say how close it had come to making a bomb. Addressing a news conference in Baghdad, he said Iraq had included all the documents in its declaration.

“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. It is for others to judge how close we were,” he said.

His statement came as Iraq’s declaration, consisting of 11,807 pages, 352 pages of supplements and 529 megabytes of data, arrived at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which heads the United Nations nuclear inspections. A UN courier was last night delivering a second package to UN headquarters in New York.

The United States and Britain are considering urging all United Nations Security Council members to meet before Christmas to make an interim judgment on the dossier.

Dr Blix is expected to give some indication of his initial assessment later this week. However, he is not due to give his full judgment until late next month. London and Washington are keen for the Security Council to be involved at an earlier stage in order to keep the pressure on Saddam during a “limbo period”.

In an attempt to increase the pressure on Baghdad, the US will today launch the first war game commanded from outside America. General Tommy Franks, commander-in-chief of US forces in the Gulf and Central Asia, will supervise a computerised exercise to see if a mobile command centre recently built in Qatar could act as a military nerve centre for a war.

Saddam delivered an unexpected apology for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 which sparked the Gulf War. The declaration appeared to be designed not for Kuwait but for the wider Arab world, which resented his invasion of a Muslim state.

Iraq’s challenge to the US and its allies came amid growing demands for President Bush to authorise the release of American intelligence to UN inspectors so they can better direct their searches.

Although Bush administration officials say they will offer details, such a move is likely to be limited by fears that Washington would risk compromising its sources.

The release of the dossier highlighted the differences between Security Council members. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the move, a day before yesterday’s deadline, showed that Baghdad was complying with the UN resolution. But Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said Saddam’s previous disclosures had been “a pack of lies”.

Twenty-four million homes in Britain will receive instructions on how to survive a terrorist attack after ministers were told that most people do not know how to respond.

Officials have ruled out a national siren to alert the whole country to an attack, on grounds of cost. All BBC local radio stations are to contact the chief executives of 400 local authorities in an attempt to improve delivery of warnings.

The increasing activity comes as the Government prepares to overhaul the Briatain’s emergency planning laws with a new civil contingencies Bill which will place emergency planning on a statutory basis for the first time.

The Government is buying more than 100,000 decontamination suits to protect key people, and decontamination shelters, stretchers, evacuation chairs and 5,000 body bags.

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