UNITED NATIONS -- Saddam Hussein secretly planned to launch 75 missiles armed with chemical or biological warheads during the 1991 Persian Gulf War if Baghdad were hit with nuclear weapons, according to a new report by U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraqi president authorized his field commanders to unleash a counterattack with 50 Al Hussein missiles armed with poison gas and 25 armed with deadly microbes. The warheads and the missiles, which could fly 400 miles, were hidden in four places outside the Iraqi capital, the report says.

Saddam's aides told U.N. inspectors that the dictator is convinced his weapons of mass destruction deterred U.S. and other armies from advancing to Baghdad during the 1991 conflict.

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The Pentagon is convinced that Iraq still possesses stockpiles of such weapons, and U.S. troops have been vaccinated, trained and equipped accordingly. U.S. intelligence officials say Saddam has already authorized the use of chemical and biological weapons if he is killed or captured, putting his younger son, Qusai, in charge.

The 173-page U.N. report on "Unresolved Disarmament Issues" does not confirm that assessment. But dense with detail, it includes several dramatic new charges suggesting that Saddam's potential weapons arsenal may be larger than previously believed.

Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, delivered the report Friday to the U.N. Security Council. It has not been released to the public, but the Los Angeles Times has obtained a copy.

The U.N. report increases the estimate for Saddam's presumed stockpile of anthrax, for example, from 8,500 liters to 10,000. "Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 liters of anthrax may still exist" and could still be viable, it said.

U.N. inspectors also warned that they may have underestimated the danger of Saddam's aging supply of mustard gas, a systemic poison that blisters the skin and is lethal if inhaled. Recent tests confirmed the "high purity" of sulfur mustard stored in artillery shells for 12 years.

In addition, previous U.N. reports stated that Iraq had not accounted for as many as 550 artillery shells and 450 aerial bombs filled with mustard gas. "However, based on a document recently received from Iraq, this quantity could be substantially higher," the report notes. Iraqi officials blame the discrepancy on faulty accounting.
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U.S. officials were especially concerned about the report's revelation that U.N. inspectors recently found a drone aircraft with a 16-foot wingspan -- about one-third the size of the U.S. military's Predator -- that Iraq had not officially declared. U.N. teams are trying to determine if the pilotless plane can fly more than 93 miles, the limit set by the United Nations.

The report notes that last December, U.N. inspectors at Khan Bani Sa'ad airfield also found modified aircraft fuel tanks that could be used as spray tanks on a drone.

Iraq has admitted that in the late 1980s it sought to convert MiG-21 jets into drones to spray chemical and biological weapons, but abandoned the effort. The program, directed by Saddam's older son, Uday, was resumed in 1995, using Czech L-29 jet trainers.

The U.N. report also sharply faults Iraq for refusing to identify its black-market sources for raw materials, equipment and supplies for its illegal weapons programs. It cites 40 cases where Baghdad has supplied "insufficient information" for biological weapons, 70 for chemical agents and nearly 500 for missiles.

"On many occasions, the imports are simply referred to as coming from the 'local market' or from 'Iraq' when it is clear that the items actually originated from overseas," it says. Many of the components for Iraq's drones and missiles "originated from overseas and the supplier has been inadequately identified."

» Iraq's secret counterattack