UNITED NATIONS — Faced with a last-minute list of demands from Washington, key nations met in crisis talks yesterday to head off a collapse of a U.N. reform summit of 180 world leaders next month.

John Bolton, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, surprised diplomats returning from vacation with 750 amendments to the reform document that is supposed to be the focus of the 60th anniversary summit Sept. 14.

In response, General Assembly President Jean Ping yesterday named a "core group" of nearly 30 countries, including the United States, to develop a new text before the summit.

The group will concentrate on several crucial sticking points, such as defining terrorism, tackling disarmament and financing development, where the United States and other countries have clashing, nearly unbudgeable positions.

The United States' 39-page revised draft eliminates nearly all references to the Millennium Development Goals adopted by all nations, including the United States, at a U.N. summit in 2000. Those goals pledge, among other things, to halve world poverty by 2015, and other nations are likely to resist that change most strongly.

The U.S. draft significantly reduces a section on poverty in favor of bolstered sections on strengthening free-market values and spreading democracy. It deletes mention of institutions and treaties the United States opposes, such as the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto treaty on global warming. The draft also deletes a proposal that nuclear powers dismantle their arsenals, but strengthens passages on fighting terrorism.

Diplomats worry that if the United States doesn't get its way, there will be nothing of substance for leaders to sign.

"There will not be nothing. But what there will be may be watered down so much, it may mean nothing." said Greece's Adamantios Vassilakis, who sits on the Security Council.

The original document is the result of more than a year and a half of studies and negotiations, and when the final draft was published Aug. 5 with a request for comments, U.N. officials expected a bit of last-minute tweaking. No one expected the United States to want to rewrite nearly every paragraph.

"The whole thing is going to die by suffocation," Pakistani envoy Munir Akram said.

Bolton's proposed alternative to renegotiating the document line-by-line is a two- or three-page statement of general reform principles, with details to be worked out. The controversial U.S. envoy sent a letter to his 190 fellow ambassadors this week, urging that they all work intensively to reach a consensus before the summit. Bolton said Thursday that the reaction had been positive and that the United States would be flexible.

"People understand that we have our differences. Other governments have their differences, too. Now we have a chance to talk about it," he said.

U.S. officials say the 11th-hour introduction of their amendments was not an act of sabotage, but simply a result of a lengthy interagency consultation in Washington.

The United States is not the only nation with objections. One diplomat described Russia's list of proposed amendments as "the size of a telephone book." Ambassador Andrey Denisov said Russia "does not have an allergy to the short document" that Bolton had proposed. "But it must be two or three substantial pages, not just slogans or formal statements of principles," he said.