THE United Nations will censor the names of Iraq’s foreign suppliers from the public version of Baghdad’s arms declaration, to spare countries embarrassment at the role their firms have played in its development of weapons of mass destruction.

Hans Blix, the UN’s chief arms inspector, has promised to provide an edited version of the Iraqi declaration to all members of the 15-nation Security Council as early as Monday after receiving advice from the five nuclear powers on which sections to cut out.

The table of contents of Iraq’s 11,807-page declaration suggests it contains a great deal of information about Baghdad’s past efforts to procure nuclear, chemical and biological weapons components abroad and even lists “foreign technical assistance” in the chemical field.

British firms are already known to be among numerous Western companies that — wittingly or not — supplied weapons-related technology to Iraq before the Gulf War.

At a lunch with Security Council members on Tuesday, however, Mr Blix indicated that he would follow the practice of previous UN inspectors in keeping secret the names of foreign suppliers.

“Foreign suppliers used to be something that they called sensitive, for the reason that they had sometimes been obtaining information through the foreign suppliers about the Iraqi programme, and if they were to give their names publicly, then they would never get another foreign supplier giving you information,” he said. “There were also those who did not know: (Suppliers) might have exported things quite legally, and they were not aware of where they were going to.”

As UN analysts studied a key 500-page section of the Iraqi declaration written in Arabic, Mr Blix said that he hoped to provide a preliminary assessment of Baghdad’s position on December 19.

He has given the five nuclear powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — until Friday to make recommendations to him on what should be removed from the published version of the dossier to prevent weapons proliferation.

“What we are now focusing upon are the things that could be risky to have spread out, and sort of ‘cookbooks’ for proliferation,” he said.

The US, along with the other nuclear powers, is already studying an unexpurgated copy of the Iraqi declaration. Diplomats say that Washington could cite false statements in the report to declare Iraq in “material breach” of UN demands — although such a statement would not immediately trigger war.

US officials, meanwhile, have presented Security Council members with a list of 36 items — many of which could be used on the battlefield — that it wants to prevent Iraq importing freely.

As well as drugs that can be used as antidotes to chemical and biological weapons, the list includes fast boats, flight simulators and communications-jamming equipment. Washington wants to ban some of the items outright, while allowing others to be imported only with the permission of the UN sanctions committee.

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