By Xinhua
Geneva : The latest U.S. intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear program seems to have lowered the possibility for a military attack on Tehran in the near future, former U.N. nuclear chief Hans Blix said on Wednesday.
An armed attack on Iran “is not credible, cannot happen after this over the next few years,” Blix, former U.N. chief arms inspector and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters in Geneva.
The U.S. report, released on Monday, said with “high confidence” that it believed Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
This is in contrast to earlier U.S. assessments that Iran was pushing ahead with its weapons program, a charge Tehran has always denied.
Blix, who now chairs Sweden’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, said the latest U.S. intelligence findings caught him by surprise, as for a long time the U.S. government has accused Tehran of trying to acquire nuclear weapons.
“The main result is that it has excluded that there will be any military action in the intermediate future,” he said.
Blix said the new report might reflect an unwillingness by U.S. intelligence agencies to take the blame for a possible new war in the region.
“The intelligence services got a lot of blame for the invasion of Iraq that they had exaggerated what they saw,” Blix said. “This time they do not want to carry the responsibility.”