A tsunami warning system that could have saved thousands of lives last Sunday should be in place in South Asia and Southeast Asia within a year, the United Nations said.

The technology to detect earthquakes under the sea and predict their consequences already exists in the Pacific and must now be extended to the Indian Ocean, said Salvano Briceno, director of the UN disaster reduction office based in Geneva, on Wednesday.

Briceno noted that the tsunami took an hour to reach the coast of Indonesia, another hour to hit Thailand and Sri Lanka and a full six hours to reach Africa. That provided ample time for many of the victims to have been warned of its approach and to have taken action to get to higher ground and save themselves.

"I want to see that every coastal country around South Asia and Southeast Asia has at least a basic but effective tsunami warning system in place by this time next year," Briceno told a news conference in Geneva.

"It's not a matter of setting up a new system or creating a new system, but more making available and connecting the authorities in Indian Ocean countries to those systems that exist," Briceno said.

What was needed, he said, was a network linking governments with earthquake warning centers in the United States and Japan and ways for those governments to speed word to their coastal communities.

"What is needed is to develop a culture of prevention to allow people to identify risk and to reduce vulnerability," he said.

Arguing that the disaster had raised global awareness of the vulnerabilities of many nations to tsunamis, Briceno said he had heard from Caribbean countries and European and North African countries along the Mediterranean asking for guidance on how to protect themselves.

Briceno said he had also been in communication with other UN agencies, with technical institutes and Indian Ocean governments and had discovered that in addition to a strong basis of knowledge, technology and willingness to collaborate, there was "a real readiness to act."

"There is no reason why this cannot be done," he said.

Briceno said the subject would now become a principal concern at a UN conference on disaster reduction scheduled for Jan. 18 to 22 in Kobe, Japan.