WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton said Wednesday he would keep pushing the Republican-controlled Senate to ratify a treaty to ban nuclear tests as other officials hinted the White House may agree to delay a vote to stave off defeat.

The Senate, which dragged its feet over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) for two years before abruptly deciding last week to consider it, appears unlikely to muster the 67 votes needed to ratify the landmark treaty by Tuesday's expected vote.

Republican and Democratic senators were discussing a way to postpone the vote, and Clinton said that he would keep fighting for the treaty until they did.

"After two long years of inaction, one week is very little time for considered action," Clinton told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. "For now the vote is scheduled for Tuesday, and I will continue to aggressively argue to the Senate and to the American people that this is in our national interest."

But other Clinton administration officials suggested it was just a matter of time before some form of compromise was worked out, either to withdraw the treaty entirely or for the Senate to postpone a vote on it for the time being.

"I'd think it would be the latter," said one official who asked not to be named, saying that the White House was unwilling to agree to withdraw the bill entirely and to lose any chance of the Senate acting on it before Clinton steps down in early 2001.

Clinton signed the treaty in 1996 and sent it to the Senate the following year.

Many of the treaty's Republican opponents argue that the U.S. inventory of nuclear weapons will deteriorate without adequate testing and that the treaty itself is impossible to verify.

The United States ceased nuclear testing in 1992 and the White House says the U.S. arsenal can be maintained through a program of sophisticated computer simulations that costs $4.5 billion per year.

The treaty would ban all signatories from conducting nuclear tests and provides for 300 monitoring stations around the world as well as for on-site inspections to verify compliance.

According to the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, 154 countries have signed the treaty and 51 of these have ratified it as of Oct. 5.

In order to take force, the treaty must be ratified by all 44 countries in the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament that have nuclear reactors or research programs, including the United States. So far, only 26 of these have done so.

Clinton has said that if the Senate fails to ratify the CTBT this would give a "green light" to countries like India and Pakistan to hone their nuclear capabilities and would deter others from signing on to the document.

The president plans to hold an event Wednesday afternoon to make the case for the treaty again, inviting pro-CTBT Nobel prize winners as well as former U.S. military and civilian officials to the White House to buttress his case.

Earlier, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart suggested that the Clinton administration was laying the groundwork for the possible postponement of the Senate vote.

Lockhart said Clinton, who dined with a bipartisan group of senators Tuesday night to try to drum up support for the treaty, believed there was not enough time before the Senate vote for a fair debate.

"The most remarkable part about the dinner was the general consensus that the process that the Senate has set up for this treaty is inadequate," Lockhart told reporters. "To try and do this in eight or nine days is simply inadequate."