Bush Issues Blunt Warning After Iraq Detains U.N. Team : Mideast: U.S. considers a plan to give Baghdad 48 hours to comply with truce terms or face military force. Inspectors find papers said to detail nuclear program.

The standoff between the United States and Iraq took on a tense new edge Monday as Baghdad temporarily detained a team of United Nations inspectors, prompting President Bush to warn that his Administration “will not compromise” in forcing Iraq to accede to U.N. cease-fire terms.

The President’s blunt declaration in a speech before the General Assembly sounded an angry U.S. response to the Iraqi move, in which officials in Baghdad seized boxes of documents that the U.N. inspectors said provided detailed evidence about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

The new act of Iraqi defiance, occurring after the White House dismissed as “inadequate” the latest assurances from Baghdad about unimpeded U.N. inspections, appeared to sharply increase the prospect that Bush would follow through on his threat to use military force to hold Iraq to the U.N. cease-fire terms.

A White House spokesman said the United States is consulting with Britain and France about a plan to give Iraq 48 hours to guarantee free access to the U.N. inspection teams. If Iraq failed to heed that deadline, the spokesman said, the United States would dispatch warplanes to the Gulf to serve as armed escorts for the inspectors.

Members of the Security Council were also meeting behind closed doors to discuss a possible U.N. response to the crisis. But U.S. officials said they do not expect the 15-member council to reach a decision until today at the earliest.

They stressed that the United States is prepared to act without formal Security Council approval and suggested that the latest Iraqi action against the inspectors could cause the United States to accelerate the pace of any action. That “new wrinkle,” one official said, means the proposed 48-hour deadline might now be “moot.”

The President himself took pains not to signal his next move. “Until we know a little more,” Bush said in a meeting with Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello, “no decisions will be made about what the United States will do.”

But Administration sources in Washington described the Iraqi move as a provocation that the United States could not ignore and said a group of high-ranking officials was meeting to put the final touches on a plan for military action.

These sources reiterated that the plan most likely to be adopted, if Iraq continues to flout the U.N. terms, would be to dispatch U.S. attack helicopters to bases in Saudi Arabia from which they would escort unarmed helicopters flown by the U.N. inspectors. But they said that if Baghdad were to resist that move, the United States then would dispatch soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division inside Iraq itself to provide security for a U.S. base of operations there.

The fury and frustration of U.S. officials here were readily apparent on a day during which Bush was forced at the last minute to amend a speech congratulating the United Nations for its earlier success in resisting Iraq in order to call upon the international body once again to stand firm against what he called the “contempt” of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“We cannot compromise for a moment in seeing that Iraq destroys all of its weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them,” Bush declared in a passage drafted only moments before he took the stage here for his annual appearance before the General Assembly.

And Secretary of State James A. Baker III issued what sounded like a pointed warning as he invoked the lesson of Iraq’s defeat in Operations Desert Storm. “We saw earlier the tragic consequences of the failure to comply with Security Council resolutions,” he warned.

In what officials described as a new pessimism about the prospect that Iraq might now agree to abide by the cease-fire terms, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Monday evening of Hussein: “The basic problem is he doesn’t want to comply. He doesn’t want to give up knowledge of his nuclear weapons program, and he doesn’t want to destroy it.”

The gloomy language sharply contrasted with the stated confidence of Bush and his most senior advisers last week that Hussein would back down in face of the new Administration threat. Officials said skepticism had taken hold when Ahmed Hussein Khudayer, the Iraqi foreign minister, showed unexpected defiance Sunday night in refusing to provide the Security Council with the unconditional guarantee it had demanded for unimpeded travel by the U.N. inspectors.

And they said their concerns had been compounded by the uncompromising refusal of armed Iraqi guards on Monday to permit the U.N. inspectors to leave a downtown Baghdad site with documents they had confiscated in a surprise inspection of the nuclear-weapons facility.

Without giving notice to Iraqi officials, the inspectors entered the Iraqi Unions Building in downtown Baghdad at 6 a.m. Monday and found a secret cache of documents that they believed amounted to the Iraqi “master plan” for nuclear weapons development. The inspectors loaded the documents into several cars, but Iraqi guards forced them to give the papers back.

Thomas R. Pickering, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the documents the U.N. team wanted from Iraq “indicate that Iraq had a clandestine nuclear weapons program.”

And at U.N. headquarters in New York, Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat charged with overseeing the elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, described the documents as probably key elements in the Iraqi nuclear development program. “They have to be removed,” he said. “Otherwise, the Iraqis can continue work on the program.”

After first refusing to let the inspectors leave with the documents and finally forcing them to give them back, Iraqi officials indicated that they would be willing to turn them over to the United Nations if its representatives signed for them, U.S. and other knowledgeable officials said.

A White House official said the United States has no objection, in principle, to such a plan. But he and others warned that the delay might permit Iraq to remove key documents.

As the Security Council met in private session to weigh the Iraqi action, it issued a statement condemning the detention of the U.N. team and Baghdad’s refusal to allow U.N. helicopters to fly over Iraq.

French Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, the council’s current president, said Iraq’s foreign minister Sunday night had merely repeated his government’s position that it would permit the helicopter flights if Iraqi officials accompanied inspectors; if the flights were limited to two weeks; inspections occurred only in western Iraq, and inspectors took no aerial photographs. “This answer does not meet the requirements set out by the council,” Merimee told reporters Monday.

But there was a hint later of possible Iraqi compliance--or at least a sudden Iraqi willingness to commit itself to paper. Merimee said Monday that the Iraqi foreign minister told him he was awaiting a written reply from his government to be communicated to the United Nations as soon as possible.

Then, speaking as France’s envoy, Merimee said that his government believes that “if the Iraqi position does not budge, then we have to take action.”

The French warning added to a show of unity with the United States by key players on the issue.

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd warned Iraq that it had only days to comply with the U.N. resolutions or face actions he would not specify.