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An exercise currently is underway in Central Europe, involving Polish, Czech and other authorities stopping a simulated rail shipment of chemical weapons bound for the Middle East.

Under the PSI, the U.S. has also signed agreements with the world's two largest shipping registries, Panama and Liberia, establishing a procedure for the U.S. Navy to board and search any vessel sailing under their flags that it suspects is carrying WMD-related cargo.

North Korea has bristled at the prospect of the U.S. and other countries intercepting its vessels. Last October Pyongyang called a PSI exercise underway off Japan an "undisguised hostile act" against North Korea.

At Tuesday's event, Rice said the initiative had made it "increasingly difficult for proliferators to ply their nefarious trade."

Welcoming the latest countries to endorse the effort -- Georgia, Iraq and Argentina -- she said the more countries actively involved, "the safer people everywhere will be."

A number of countries have been reluctant to participate in the PSI, for various reasons. China and South Korea, for example, are loathe to be seen as ganging up against North Korea, while others don't want to upset Iran.

Some are worried about legal or sovereignty issues, or may simply not want to cooperate with what they regard as a U.S. initiative.

Strengthening Washington's argument that the PSI is a broad, multilateral effort rather than a U.S.-dictated one, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan during a anti-terrorism summit in Spain last March encouraged all states to join PSI.

Earlier, a panel of experts tasked by Annan to examine U.N. reforms also praised the PSI, saying the exposed Khan proliferation network demonstrated "the need for and the value of measures taken to interdict the illicit and clandestine trade in components for nuclear programs."

Although most of the PSI founding members are close allies of the U.S., not all have been supportive in recent years of U.S. policies abroad. France and Germany, notably, opposed the war in Iraq, yet both are core PSI members and have moreover hosted exercises.

One of several foreign ambassadors attending Tuesday's event, Singapore's Chan Heng Chee, says her nation is actively trying to win over some of its South-East Asian neighbors and has invited them to observe a PSI exercise Singapore is hosting in August.

"We hope this first-hand experience of how an actual PSI operation will take place will help allay their concerns about the legal and operational aspects of the PSI and bring them on board," she said in comments released by the embassy.

Chan said countries in the region were generally supportive of the objective of countering WMD proliferation.

"However, they have indicated that they would need some time to sort out the legal and operational details in their inter-agency processes."

She did not name the countries, but neither Indonesia nor Malaysia is a PSI participant. The two Muslim nations are both located adjacent to some of the world's busiest but least secure shipping routes.

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