Washington, Oct. 6: The government?s most definitive account of Iraq?s arms programmes will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the US invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, US officials said yesterday.

The officials said that the 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbours or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed ?a gathering threat.?

The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former UN weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein?s weapons-development programmes and knowledge base was less advanced in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.

?They have not found anything yet,? said one US official who had been briefed on the report.

A senior US government official said that the report includes comments Hussein made to debriefers after his capture that bolster administration assertions, including his statement that his past possession of weapons of mass destruction ?was one of the reasons he had survived so long.? He also maintained such weapons saved his government by halting Iranian ground offensives during the Iran-Iraq war and deterred coalition forces from pressing on to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War.

The official also said that Duelfer?s Iraq Survey Group had uncovered Iraqi plans for ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 km and for a 1,000-km-range cruise missile, farther than the 150-km range permitted by the UN, the senior official said.

The official said Duelfer will tell Congress in the report that Hussein intended to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction programmes if he were freed of the UN sanctions that prevented him from getting needed materials.

Duelfer?s report said Hussein was pursuing an aggressive effort to subvert the international sanctions through illegal financing and procurement efforts.

The official said the report states that Hussein had the intent to resume full-scale weapons of mass destruction efforts after the sanctions were eliminated, and details Hussein?s efforts to hinder international inspectors and preserve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

Representative Jane Harman, vice-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said she had not read Duelfer?s report but has been told that it thoroughly undercuts the administration?s assertions that Iraq posed a serious threat.

?Intentions do not constitute a growing danger,? Harman said. ?It?s hardly mushroom clouds, hardly stockpiles,? she added, a reference to administration rhetoric used in the run-up to the war.

The report?s release comes at a point in the presidential campaign when Democratic candidate John Kerry is aggressively challenging the Bush administration about its pre-war justifications for invading Iraq, which centered largely on the contention that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.