Attack on Iran 'will backfire'

Dubai: A military strike on Iran will guarantee an outcome that it was meant to deny - an Iranian nuclear weapon, a British nuclear specialist has claimed.

Military action will backfire and create an atmosphere where Iran will give the development of a nuclear weapon its highest priority, Frank Barnaby said in a report published by the Oxford Research Group, a British think-tank.

"No air strike will kill all the scientists or totally destroy forever any capability to develop nuclear weapons," Barnaby said.

Instead, air strikes will give hardliners more credibility, ignite nationalist fervour and lead to a nuclear device being assembled, Barnaby said.

Iran denies Western accusations it is trying to build nuclear weapons and claims its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.

Nuclear scientists believe that Iran is between five and ten years away from producing a nuclear weapon if it wanted to and Barnaby believes this time frame offers a window of opportunity for diplomacy to work.

Air strikes would be unlikely to destroy all the centrifuges Iran is using to enrich uranium, the report says and it could ignite a scenario as disastrous as Iraq.

This is a viewpoint echoed by Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector at the time of the Iraq invasion, in a forward to the report who argues that an assault on Iran could turn out to be every bit as catastrophic.

"In the case of Iraq, the armed action launched aimed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction - that did not exist. It led to tragedy and regional turmoil. In the case of Iran armed action would be aimed at intentions, that may or may not exist. However, the same result, tragedy and regional turmoil , would inevitably follow."

An attack would probably mean Iran withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty, and force the departure of UN inspectors.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month described his country's nuclear policy as a train with no brakes or reverse gear. This prompted a rebuttal from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who said the US did not want brakes but a stop button.

Advocates of military strikes against Iran, Bush administration neocons and the Israeli government, argue that military strikes would at least slow down the development of a weapon which they suspect Iran wants to develop.