WASHIGNTON, May 25 (AFP) - The just-released Cox report charging China with having stolen US nuclear weapons secrets will complicate negotiations on Beijing's admission to the WTO, Commerce Secretary William Daley warned here Tuesday. Daley told AFP the report was "damaging" to US efforts to reach an agreement with China under which the United States would back its accession to the World Trade Organization. "It will make things more difficult," he said. "But we hope we can reach a deal this year." Negotiations between the United States and China on WTO accession have been in suspension since the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade May 7. But even prior to the attack, which NATO said was accidental, talks had bogged down over US demands for stronger Chinese market-opening commitments. The fear now is that the report will encourage China's many congressional critics to inject their security fears into the debate on US-China trade ties. Daley referred to strong comments last week from Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, who said the spying charges should indeed be taken into consideration by US officials when evaluating the commercial relationship. Lott spoke after having been briefed on the contents of the report by its author, California Republican Representative Christopher Cox. "I don't think we can trust China to live up to an agreement they make on trade," he said. "We should demand a good deal for us and, this is more important, that it be enforced." Suggestions that Congress should not exclude security concerns in its evaluation of commercial ties unnerve US corporations, who want the debate to focus on measures that can enhance their ability to compete and turn a profit in China. "The strategic issues, while the most serious a nation can encounter, will have to be sorted out over time and kept in a separate category," said Joseph Gavin of the US Council for International Business. "Our hope would be that after some consideration that that kind of approach will prevail." But he acknowledged that the Cox report is "clearly a burden" for US corporations. While the Senate would not vote directly on a US-China WTO deal, it will likely be called on next month to approve a renewal of Beijing's normal trading status with the United States. A Senate refusal to endorse such a status for another year would scuttle chances of a US-China accord on the WTO. The United States and China were thought to have been on the verge of a WTO agreement when Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji visited Washington in April and met President Bill Clinton. But the two leaders failed to seal the deal, which Zhu blamed on anti-China sentiment in Congress that Clinton was reluctant to confront. The Chinese were later outraged after the United States released a detailed list of what it said had been market-opening concessions by Beijing. Chinese officials insisted that many of the concessions had not in fact been agreed on. After US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky last week predicted that US-Chinese WTO talks would soon resume, a Chinese trade official said bluntly: "We have not invited them." He added that there had in fact been no contacts with the United States on the WTO question since the embassy bombing.  