AMERICA’S war plans suffered a setback yesterday when the chief UN arms inspectors reported that their teams had found “no smoking guns” in Iraq.

The inspectors, Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, told the UN Security Council that Iraq’s 12,000-page weapons declaration “failed to answer a great many questions” and criticised the level of co-operation they were getting from Iraq.

The two men promised to demand a full list of Iraqi chemical and biological scientists, and to begin interviewing those scientists next week. But their report left the Bush Administration without a compelling reason with which to justify an imminent military campaign to sceptical world public opinion.

“Inspections should continue and for that reason there are no grounds for military action,” Gunter Pleuger, Germany’s UN Ambassador, said. Germany will chair the 15-nation body next month. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Ambassador, said: “This is part of very professional work which should continue, which is in very early stages.”

The White House insisted that Mr Blix’s report changed nothing. “The problem with guns that are hidden is you can’t see their smoke,” Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said. “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”

John Negroponte, the American Ambassador to the UN, said Iraq had to admit to its weapons programmes and cooperate actively with the inspectors. He argued that anything less “will constitute further material breach” — the diplomatic term for triggering military action.

However Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, had started playing down the prospect of imminent war even before Mr Blix delivered his statement. January 27 — the day Mr Blix delivers his formal assessment of Iraq’s compliance with UN disarmament demands — was “not necessarily a D-day for decision-making”, he told The Washington Post.

Downing Street also played down the prospect of early military action. Tony Blair told the Cabinet that UN weapons inspectors needed “time and space” to do their job properly. “We are in the middle of a process. The UN inspectors have just, at the beginning of the year, got their full complement of inspectors there,” he said. Although January 27 was “an important staging post (it) shouldn’t be regarded in any sense as a deadline”.

Labour MPs said that Dr Blix’s statement would make it virtually impossible for Mr Blair to convince the public and his own backbenchers of the case for war.

Kevin Brennan, a Cardiff MP normally loyal to the Government, said backbench support rested on the inspectors finding hard evidence of a breach of the UN resolution. “Unless we have a smoking gun we can’t go to war just because George Bush has marched his men up to the top of the hill,” he said. “If the UN weapons inspectors report in this fashion on January 27, I can’t see how a great number of Labour MPs will think that a war is justified.”

Dr Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and Dr ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that they would demand a full list of scientists working on weapons of mass destruction when they visited Baghdad on January 19 and 20. The list Iraq provided last month was inadequate, Dr Blix said. The inspectors would also begin interviewing Iraqi scientists next week, possibly in Cyprus.

For its part, the Bush Administration said that it had to give the inspectors intelligence information that would enable them to become “more aggressive and more comprehensive”, Mr Powell said. The most sensitive intelligence would, however, still be held back.

Delivering their intermediate report to the Security Council, Dr Blix and Dr ElBaradei said that Iraq had adopted a “prompt access/open doors policy” to inspectors since they resumed work on November 27 after a break of four years.

But Dr Blix cautioned: “The absence of ‘smoking guns’ and the prompt access which we have had so far, and which is most welcome, is no guarantee that prohibited stocks or activities could not exist at other sites, whether above ground, underground or in mobile units.”

The inspectors presented a litany of complaints about the level of Iraqi co-operation, saying they had made no progress towards answering longstanding questions about its production of anthrax and VX nerve gas and that Iraq had failed to account for a stockpile of 32 tonnes of HMX high explosive of the type used to trigger nuclear bombs.

They reported that Iraq had broken the UN arms embargo by importing missile engines and aluminium tubing for building rockets.

They also complained that Baghdad had failed to provide an adequate list of its weapons scientists — leaving out some already known to UN inspectors — and was not making scientists available for private interviews without the presence of official “minders”.

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