Air strikes on Iran could backfire: Report

London, Mar 5: Military strikes to destroy Iran's nuclear ambitions could backfire, increasing Tehran's determination to obtain atomic weapons and bolstering hostility towards the West, a report said today.

The report ''Would air strikes work?'', written by a leading British weapons scientist, said strikes would probably be unable to hit enough targets to cause serious damage to Iran's nuclear facilities.

''With inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely it would be possible to identify and subsequently destroy the number of targets needed to set back Iran's nuclear programme for a significant period,'' said the report.

''In the aftermath of a military strike, if Iran devoted maximum effort and resources to building one nuclear bomb, it could achieve this in a relatively short amount of time.'' Such a weapon would then be wielded in ''an environment of incalculably greater hostility,'' said the report, which was published by the Oxford Research Group and written by Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist and weapons expert.

Barnaby, one of the few remaining people in the world to have witnessed an above ground nuclear test, urged greater diplomatic efforts to end a standoff with Tehran.

Iran refused to meet a United Nations deadline last week for halting uranium enrichment -- a process that can produce nuclear fuel for use in power plants or weapons.

Iran's defiance prompted Washington to say all options are on the table for dealing with what it sees as a potential nuclear threat from Iran, and an Iranian deputy foreign minister responded by saying Tehran was prepared even for war.

Blix Backs Report

Iran is likely to have built secret facilities underground as well as ''false targets'' designed to look like nuclear sites and act as decoys, Barnaby's report said.

An attack on those facilities would boost support for the country's authorities, the author told Reuters in an interview ahead of the report's release.

''If Iran is bombed the whole community is going to be totally united behind the government to speedily produce a nuclear weapon,'' he said. ''It would be an absolutely idiotic thing to do.'' Strikes would also interrupt oil supplies and impact the global economy, he said.

Hans Blix, former UN chief weapons inspector, backed the conclusions and warned Washington and its allies to learn from Iraq, where a decision to invade was based partly on a false belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

''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,'' Blix wrote in a foreword to the report.

Barnaby said bombing targets such as the Bushehr nuclear power reactor in southwest Iran once they were operational could cause potentially catastrophic contamination.

''To bomb that would be absolutely criminal you'd have another Chernobyl on your hands,'' he said.

Barnaby, 79, witnessed an atomic weapons test and saw the awful power of the explosion in 1953 in the Australian desert.

''You can't avoid being profoundly affected by that kind of experience. Seeing these things explode in the atmosphere, it makes you imagine what would happen if it exploded over a city.

It's absolutely horrifying and it convinces you quite rapidly that these weapons have to be negotiated away.''

Reuters

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