Foreign Secretary Jack Straw last night threw down the gauntlet to the international community to uphold the will of the United Nations and enforce the disarmament of Iraq "on its own terms".

In an impassioned speech to the UN Security Council, he announced that Britain and its allies, the US and Spain, were tabling an amended resolution giving Saddam Hussein ten more days to disarm peacefully.

But he warned fellow foreign ministers on the council that if Iraq did not comply, action must follow to ensure that it was forcibly stripped of its weapons of mass destruction.

"The council must send Iraq a clear message that we will resolve this crisis on the United Nations' terms, the terms which the council established a month ago when we unanimously adopted in resolution 1441," he said.

However, even before he spoke, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin had signalled that his country was prepared to use its veto to block the plan, describing the deadline of only a few days as a "pretext for war".

"We cannot accept an ultimatum as long as the (UN weapons) inspectors are reporting cooperation," he said.

The announcement of the amended resolution followed the latest reports to the Security Council by chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei.

In another mixed assessment, Dr Blix said that while there had been some "proactive" cooperation by the Iraqis, it still fell short of the "immediate" compliance with resolution 1441.

He said the destruction of 34 of Iraqis' banned Al Samoud 2 missiles represented a "substantial measure of disarmament".

"We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks. Lethal weapons are being destroyed," he said.

But he said that the inspectors were still not receiving sufficient "high quality information" to determine what had happened to Iraq's missing chemical and biological warfare agents.