TEHRAN - Iran on Tuesday exulted at a U.S. intelligence report contradicting earlier Bush administration assertions it was building an atomic bomb, but President George W. Bush said Iran remained dangerous and international pressure should continue.
The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published on Monday took U.S. friends and foes by surprise after years of strident rhetoric from Washington accusing Tehran of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
Iran said the report vindicated its long-standing assertion that its nuclear program had only peaceful civilian aims.
"It's natural that we welcome it when those countries who in the past have questions and ambiguities about this case ... now amend their views realistically," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told state radio.
The report, which said that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but was continuing to develop the capacity to enrich uranium, had an immediate impact on moves under way to tighten U.N. sanctions on Tehran.
China, which has a U.N. Security Council veto and agreed only reluctantly to earlier sanctions, said the NIE created new conditions. "I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed," China's U.N. Ambassador Guangya Wang said.
France and Britain joined Bush in saying international pressure must be maintained on Iran, while Israel, which believes a nuclear Iran could threaten its existence, questioned the report and urged continued pressure on Tehran.
At a news conference in Washington, Bush said the report should in fact be taken as a rallying point for further pressure on Iran and showed that the approach had been successful in the past.
He said the NIE showed Iran was still developing nuclear technology and could restart a covert weapons program: "Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
In London a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the report confirmed it had been right to worry about Iran's nuclear ambitions and showed that "the sanctions program and international pressure were having an effect in that they seem to have abandoned the weaponization element."
FRANCE BACKS SANCTIONS
France took a similar stand. "We must keep up the pressure on Iran ... we will continue to work on the introduction of restrictive measures in the framework of the United Nations," a French foreign ministry spokeswoman said.
