The discovery last week by US intelligence that Iraq had developed drone aircraft capable of dispensing chemical weapons "should be of concern to everybody," Powell said after a meeting with Foreign Minister Francois Fall of Guinea, and that the discovery may be another violation by Baghdad of UN resolutions.

The fuel capacity of the unmanned aerial vehicle enables it to fly beyond the 150km range limit imposed by the United Nations.

That was aside "from the fact that it may contain biological and chemical weapons," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. He said the UN Security Council was expected to discuss the discovery, made by UN weapons inspectors, during a meeting in New York.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said information provided by UN inspectors about the drone was further evidence that Iraq was not complying with its international obligations.

"There is a drone ... that they came upon, that they discovered, that they are not supposed to have and it looks like it is a prohibited item," Powell said.

Speaking on Fox News, he indicated Washington would use the discovery of the unmanned aircraft, which apparently has a wingspan of eight metres, to put further pressure on doubters within the UN Security Council to back military action against Iraq.

"It is the kind of thing we'll be making some news about in the course of the week," he said.

Iraq Halts Al-Samoud Production, Number Of UN Inspectors Falls
Iraq has stopped the production of banned Al-Samoud 2 missiles, a UN spokesman said Tuesday, confirming the destruction of 55 missiles in 10 days. "They have stopped the production" of Al-Samoud 2 missiles, UN inspectors' spokesman Hiro Ueki told a press conference.

Ueki said three more banned Al-Samoud 2 missiles, nine warheads and a launcher were destroyed under UN supervision on Tuesday.

He added that the number of UN inspectors in Iraq had fallen to 71, from more than 100 at the end of February, but denied the fall was part of evacuation plans ahead of an anticipated US-led war.

Israel Developing Credit Card-Sized, 100g Aircraft Jerusalem (AFP) Mar 8 - Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) is developing a miniature 100- gram aeroplane, the size of a credit card, to gather intelligence, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported yesterday. The drone will carry tiny cameras and communication equipment which will allow it to relay information in real time from the battlefield to army headquarters, the paper said. The plane's very small size makes it almost undetectable as it cannot be picked up by radars or spotted in the air by the naked eye. It can be hand thrown and test flights revealed it can fly for 20-minute periods. The paper said the nano-aircraft can enter a room by a window to relay pictures of hidden enemies. It also said the United States could make use of such a spy plane during its impending strike against Iraq, although the mini-plane is still in its early development stages.

"We have not brought down the number of our staff," he said, explaining that many inspectors had left Iraq after the expiry of their three-month contracts and others had since arrived.

"One dozen arrived in Baghdad on Tuesday," he said.

The latest Al-Samoud destructions raised to 55 the number of missiles scrapped since the process was launched on March 1, roughly half the total number which Iraqi officials say were produced.

Twenty-eight combat warheads, two launchers, five engines and components of the guidance and control systems have also been destroyed.

Iraqi officials say the country has produced about 100 Al-Samoud 2 missiles, which UN experts said had to be scrapped because they exceeded the range limit of 150 kilometres (93 miles) allowed by UN resolutions.

The scrapping of the missiles has been the most tangible sign of Iraq's cooperation with the inspectors probing its alleged weapons of mass destruction programmes.

However, London and Washington remain unconvinced and want a UN resolution giving Iraq until March 17 to prove it is fully and actively disarming, or face an attack from about 250,000 troops they have massed in the region.

US tests its heaviest bomb in Florida
In other developments The United States Air Force tested its heaviest bomb -- a 21,000-pound (9,545 kilo) satellite guided behemoth -- at a Florida range Tuesday in a show of devastating force as US forces mass for war against Iraq, officials said.

The Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb, known informally as the "mother of all bombs," surpasses the 15,000 pound "daisy cutter" as the largest conventional bomb in the US inventory.

"This is not small," US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would not say whether the new weapon would be deployed to the Iraq theater.

"But obviously, anything we have in the arsenal, anything that's in almost any stage of development could be used. We did that in Desert Storm with Joint Stars. We could do that with capabilities here," he said.

Rumsfeld treated the event as just another weapons test but acknowledged that Washington is seeking to exert maximum pressure on Iraq.

"The goal is to have the pressure be so great that Saddam Hussein cooperates," he said.

"Short of that, an unwillingness to cooperate, the goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there is an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight against the coalition and there's an enormous incentive for Saddam Hussein to leave and spare the world a conflict," he said.

A spokeswoman at the Eglin Air Force base said the bomb was tested just after 1800 GMT.

"It did go off," said senior airman Nicholasa Brown.

The massive explosion was expected to send up a mushroom cloud over a test range at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

"It could be used as a pretty devastating weapon against ground troops, a psychological weapon," said Jake Swenson, another air force spokesman at the base.

"Any weapon of that magnitude will create a mushroom cloud, depending upon the debris on the surface," he said.

The smaller "daisy cutter" was used in Vietnam to clear jungle for helicopter landing pads, in the 1991 Gulf War to clear minefields, and in Afghanistan to clear caves and strike fear in al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Development of the bomb began last year at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Eglin last and was due to be completed late this year.

The MOAB has a satellite guidance system and a tail kit to steer it to within about 13 meters (14 yards) of its target.

It is so big it is pushed out of the back of a C-130 cargo plane.

"It's on a pallet. A parachute drags the pallet out, and the bomb swings off the pallet. The pallet continues on down on parachute. And the bomb goes along its merry way with GPS," Swenson said.

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