TOWN AND COUNTRY, Mo. -- Former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay said Thursday that Iraq did not cooperate with weapons inspections from 1991 to 1998 and doubted it would in the future.

Kay, addressing a group at Maryville University, said that record of mistrust shapes the issue the United States now faces -- whether a country has the authority to pre-emptively strike at another.

"It's not an easy debate," Kay told a group of St. Louis-area police, fire and medical first-responders gathered to discuss domestic security in insecure times.

Kay compared it to an earlier era's "wrenching debate" over containing threats from the former Soviet Union.

Kay led a team of U.N. inspectors looking for nuclear weapons in Iraq from 1991-92. He said he found that Iraq had the capacity to produce nuclear weapons and that U.S. intelligence didn't even know half the sites existed.

When his teams seized documents on Iraq's nuclear weapons program, they were detained for four days in a Baghdad parking lot. They eventually left with the papers.

Kay also said the "genuine secrets" of making nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are in the public domain, prompting his warning to the police, fire and medical responders in the university auditorium.

"No matter how good you are, some day, some time" such weapons will be used against society, and communities' first responders must be prepared, he said.

GOP Rep. Todd Akin invited Kay to his St. Louis-area district to speak at a forum and make a campaign appearance. Akin said the proximity to the Nov. 5 election requires that campaign funds pay for the trip.

Disputes colleague

Kay said he was "concerned" that his friend and colleague, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, is writing and saying publicly that any arsenal Iraq might have isn't a threat and that Saddam Hussein doesn't have the ability to make nuclear weapons. Ritter also contends that U.N. inspections eliminated 95 percent of Iraq's deadly weaponry by 1998.

"I have a lot of admiration for what Scott did in Iraq, but I don't understand his conclusion," Kay said.

Under the agreement that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq is barred from developing weapons of mass destruction and under orders to allow any already in its arsenal to be destroyed.

Iraq denies having such weapons.

The inspectors left in December 1998, ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes, and Iraq has barred them from returning.

The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday was handed a U.S. proposal, drafted with British support, that would give the inspectors broad new powers to seek out and destroy material for weapons of mass destruction.