CRAWFORD, Jan 1: The United States is not sure whether or not Iraq has nuclear arms although the country has tried to develop such a programme in the past, US President George Bush said on Tuesday.

“We don’t know whether or not he has a nuclear weapon,” Bush told reporters here, noting, however that Saddam Hussein had been “close” to obtaining one in the past.

“Now we’ve brought the world together to send a clear signal we expect him to disarm, to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

Bush said that he still hopes that Iraq will disarm peacefully and avoid a war.

“Again, I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully,” Bush said. “One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work to deal with these situations in a way so that they’re resolved peacefully. But thus far it appears that on first look that Saddam Hussein hadn’t heard the message,” he said.

As for the crisis provoked by North Korea’s move to relaunch its nuclear weapons programme and its expulsion of UN monitors, Bush said that, too, could be resolved without military action.

“The North Korean situation is one that can be resolved peacefully through diplomacy,” he said, adding: “This is not a military showdown” but a “diplomatic” one.

He said that he had spoken by telephone with Chinese President Jiang Zemin to discuss a “nuclear weapons-free peninsula,” and had also had a “very good visit” by phone with South Korea’s President-elect Roh Moo-Hyun

As the world held its breath to see whether 2003 would usher in a new US-led war in the Gulf, Iraq invited chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix to talks in Baghdad ahead of a report he is due to present to the UN Security Council on Jan 27.

General Amer al-Saadi, a top advisor to President Saddam Hussein, sent Blix a letter proposing he come to Iraq “between the second and third week of January” to discuss cooperation between the two sides, the official INA news agency said.

A UN spokesman said discussions were underway with the Iraqis on setting a date for Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohammed ElBaradei to visit.

Blix is due to report on the work of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq to the UN Security Council on January 27.

The proposed talks would aim at “reviewing cooperation between us during the past period and looking at ways of boosting that cooperation in the coming months to realize our common objective of a speedy implementation of UNMOVIC’s mandate,” Saadi wrote, according to the Arabic text carried by INA.

Together with the IAEA, UNMOVIC resumed arms inspections in Iraq on Nov 27.

The inspectors on Tuesday visited eight sites in the Iraqi capital and outlying areas Tuesday, the 32nd day of inspections.—AFP