UNITED NATIONS - The United States has taken possession of a copy of Iraq's declaration of its weapons programs, after persuading the four other permanent members of the Security Council to back it in insisting on seeing the document immediately, U.S. officials said yesterday.

In doing so, Washington reversed a decision that all 15 Security Council nations made Friday to hold off on receiving the declaration until it was screened by U.N. experts for information that could be used to make a nuclear weapon. That process would have taken seven to 10 days, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice decided late Friday that they did not want to wait, U.S. officials said.

A table of contents of the declaration, released by the United States yesterday, suggests that it includes much detailed technical information about Iraq's past secret efforts to build a nuclear weapon. It also hints at information about countries that provided Iraq with equipment for its illicit nuclear effort.

The declaration was given to the United States by U.N. inspections chief Hans Blix at the behest of the Colombian ambassador to the United Nations, Alfonso Valdivieso, who is serving as Security Council president.

Powell called Colombian officials over the weekend to secure their cooperation with Washington's plan, U.S. officials said. Powell returned Wednesday night from a trip to Colombia where he announced major increases in U.S. military aid.

A Colombian diplomat acknowledged that his government had made a "political decision" to accede to the U.S. plan and wave aside objections from some of the nonpermanent council members, most notably Syria.

Yesterday morning, U.S. diplomats sent the declaration to Washington, where they said copies of the mountains of paper and CD-ROMs were being prepared yesterday for the four other permanent members - Britain, France, Russia and China. The diplomats said copies would be distributed through secure channels by this morning at the latest. France and Britain confirmed last night that they had received their copies.

One section of the table of contents released yesterday is called "enrichment by gaseous diffusion and gaseous centrifuge"; another is a 30-page section on "isotope separation by laser," followed by "enrichment of lithium isotopes."

There is also a 111-page section titled "Procurements of petrochemicals and the Design Centre," which could detail which countries gave Iraq what equipment.

The table of contents also refers to 300 pages that describe the current status of 27 Iraqi industrial sites that could have had some nuclear activity between 1991 and 2002.

The Bush administration is eager to make its own study of the 12,000-page declaration and compare it with U.S. intelligence to see if there are omissions or inconsistencies that would put Iraq in new violation of Security Council resolutions requiring it to disarm.

Syria objects strongly

Most of the council's 10 nonpermanent members agreed - some very reluctantly - to be excluded for the time being from seeing the declaration, diplomats from those countries said. But Syria, the only Arab nation on the council, strongly objected to favoring the permanent members and accused Colombia of violating basic diplomatic norms.

With the change of approach, meticulous reviews of the weapons declarations will be taking place in Washington and four other capitals at the same time as U.N. weapons analysts are poring over the documents. Although U.S. officials said they were only seeking to help the United Nations with the giant task of deciphering the information, Washington's move gave yet another sign that it seeks faster weapons inspections in Iraq than do Blix and other international weapons chiefs.

In arguing for early access to the Iraqi document, administration officials said the United States and the other permanent, veto-bearing members would not need to wait for the United Nations to pick it clean of data that could foster nuclear proliferation. The five are already nuclear powers, the officials pointed out.

"We would have nothing to gain in terms of proliferation from reading an unsanitized version, because we already have that information" about the structure of nuclear weapons, a U.S. official said.

"This is not a question of asserting some special privilege," U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte said. "It's more question of drawing on the expertise of declared nuclear weapons states" to expedite the analysis of the enormous declaration.

He called it "a win-win situation for everyone."

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian ambassador, said: "The sole purpose of this exercise is to make sure that nonproliferation treaties are respected. Nothing else is behind this process."

But U.S. diplomats and others from the permanent council nations were determined to bar nonnuclear nations from obtaining unfiltered copies of the report. The 10 countries that are currently rotating council members have all signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and so face legal restrictions on their access to nuclear arms data.

"It could have signaled to the rest of the world what Iraq still needs, and we have plenty of enemies who could supply what they need," a U.S. official said.

Iraq alerted the council that some of the material in the declaration could be dangerous if made public.

"I should like to draw the attention of the Security Council to the fact that the publication of this detailed information, in particular the parts relating to research and development and techniques for the production of agents and weapons, entails risk and is inconsistent with the norms of the weapons nonproliferation regime," wrote Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri in a cover letter Saturday that came with the declaration.

Blix and his chemical and biological arms team, and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, will remove the sensitive passages from the documents and keep them in their confidential files. They expect to have completed most of this work by Dec. 19, when Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the nuclear agency, will meet with the Security Council.

Blix said yesterday that he agreed with the U.S. plan. "I have no problem," he said. "We work at the service of the Security Council."

It remained unclear when and how the nonpermanent members would have access to the nuclear information.

"We are not happy," said Mikhail Wehbe, the Syrian ambassador. "It is in contradiction to the political logic, to the procedural logic, to every kind of logic the Security Council used to work on." The council president normally acts only by the consensus of all 15 members.

Mexico was among the countries that went along without much enthusiasm yesterday with the new arrangements. Powell spoke by phone Sunday with Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castaneda.

'War is not inevitable'

Secretary-General Kofi Annan stressed yesterday that the U.N. weapons experts should be given time to do their work in Iraq. "I have always maintained that the inspectors have work to do and we should allow them to do a professional job, and I have indicated they should be given the time and the space to do it," he said.

For emphasis he added: "I do expect the council to support the inspectors as they do a professional job."

In contrast to the increasingly bellicose language from Washington, the secretary-general also made it clear that he believes war can still be avoided.

"I have maintained that war is not inevitable and it is up to President Saddam Hussein to disarm, to cooperate fully with the inspectors and honor all his obligations to the United Nations," he said. "If that is done, I would see no reason for war."