GENEVA (AP) - China urged disarmament negotiators Thursday to consider the ``grave consequences'' of U.S. plans for a national missile defense system, dismissing President Clinton's deferral of a decision to deploy it.

China and Russia have been leading voices denouncing the idea of a limited U.S. shield against missile attack from countries like Iraq and North Korea. They maintain that it would undermine arms-control and disarmament treaties already in effect, in particular the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Clinton earlier this month decided not to authorize the National Missile Defense, leaving the decision to his successor.

But the deferral ``does not mean at all that the NMD plan has been given up,'' Chinese Ambassador Hu Xiaodi told delegates at the 66-nation Conference on Disarmament here. He cited ``the grave consequences of the development and deployment.''

``The U.S. president has instructed the continued development and testing of NMD,'' he said. ``The international community should be clear about this fact.''

U.S. diplomats rejected the Chinese comments, suggesting that China and others are using objections to the NMD as a smoke screen to create ``utter paralysis'' blocking disarmament negotiations.

The United States has been pressing for years for negotiations on a treaty banning the production of ``fissile materials'' - plutonium and highly enriched uranium - needed to make nuclear weapons. Washington maintains that negotiations on outer space are a nonstarter and are blocking work on the fissile material ban. Western diplomats have suggested that China, with a much smaller nuclear arsenal than Russia or the United States, wants to avoid a ban on fissile materials.

In any event, Washington maintains, the NMD would be land-based and would have no impact on armaments in space.

``I'm puzzled at the intensity of the concerns that have been expressed,'' U.S. Ambassador Robert T. Grey said Thursday.

He rejected Chinese suggestions the United States was trying to control the world and added a pointed dig: ``The era of empires is over, as is the era of one-party states.''

Grey stressed that Washington believes proposed amendments to the ABM treaty would update rather than destroy it.

``If the ABM regime were to fail, the responsibility for that and for all the results that might ensue would rest with those who were insisting the regime had to remain static and could not be adapted to meet current realities,'' he said.

The conference, the world's main multilateral disarmament forum, ends its annual session next week.

The conference has been deadlocked on starting any new negotiations since it wrote the treaty to ban nuclear test explosions in 1996. This year's session has been dominated by rancorous exchanges over the NMD project.

In Beijing on Thursday, Chinese and U.S. arms negotiators held the first of two days of talks as part of a renewed dialogue aimed at curbing China's suspected transfer of missile technology to Pakistan and other countries. Those talks resumed in July after a 19-month interruption.