Speaking in French on the last day of the assembly's annual meeting, De Hoop Scheffer said he wanted to advocate "strengthening the unique role of the alliance as a permanent and structured forum for transatlantic political debate".

"At a time when new risks and new threats appear, when old strategies are no longer valid, a thorough debate is needed to find the right answers," he said. When addressing new security challenges such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, only "straightforward dialogue" would bring about solutions, he added.

In a resolution adopted at the end of the session, the assembly called for a "redoubling of efforts to help Russia secure its stocks of weapons of mass destruction" by 2009.

It expressed "concern at the possibility of terrorist attacks using nuclear, biological of chemical weapons", and stressed that Russia's stockpiles were "the most important in the world".

"The declassified Russian nuclear submarines constitute grave threats from the point of view of proliferation and the environment, and Russia is far from having the means of countering this threat without foreign assistance."

In his speech, De Hoop Scheffer said more dialogue was needed on NATO's possible future enlargement to include new candidates like the Balkan states, Ukraine and Georgia.

Facing today's new realities, NATO needs to be "more open" towards the rest of the world, since "cooperation with other countries and institutions has become strategically imperative", he said.

De Hoop Scheffer pointed out that the alliance's cooperation with the European Union had increased its ability to help find political solutions in a number of the world's hotspots.

NATO was "more and more being considered a respected political actor in discussions on the futures of Kosovo and Afghanistan," he argued.

Expanding NATO's political presence would in no way dilute its identity as a military alliance however, the secretary general said, insisting that the organization "will not become a mini-UN".

The five-day Parliamentary Assembly began on Friday, and saw some 300 deputies from 39 countries attend discussions largely centered around the alliance's future role in Iraq, the Middle East and Afghanistan.

The Parliamentary Assembly, created in 1955 and entirely independent of NATO, gathers 248 deputies from the alliance's 26 member states and 61 deputies from 13 associated countries, as well as a delegation from the European Parliament.

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