In a veritable blitz of editorials and opinion pieces published Wednesday and Thursday, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the National Review warned that Tehran had passed a significant benchmark in what they declared was its quest for nuclear weapons and that the administration must now plan in earnest to destroy Iran's known nuclear facilities, as well as possible military targets to prevent it from retaliating.

Comparing Iran's alleged push to gain a nuclear weapon to Adolf Hitler's 1936 march on the Rhineland, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol called for undertaking "serious preparation for possible military action -- including real and urgent operational planning for bombing strikes and for the consequences of such strikes".

"(A) great nation has to be serious about its responsibilities," according to Kristol, a leading neo-conservative champion of the Iraq war and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, "even if executing other responsibilities has been more difficult than one would have hoped."

The National Review, another prominent right-wing weekly, echoed the call. "Any air campaign should ...be coupled with aggressive and persistent efforts to topple the regime from within," advised its lead editorial, entitled "Iran, Now", and almost certainly written by Michael Ledeen of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

"Accordingly, it should hit not just the nuclear facilities, but also the symbols of state oppression: the intelligence ministry, the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard, the guard towers of the notorious Evin Prison."

The hawks' latest campaign appeared timed not only to the alarm created by Iran's nuclear achievement and by a spate of reports last weekend regarding the advanced state of U.S. war plans, but also to counter new appeals by a number of prominent and more mainstream former policy-makers for Washington to engage Iran in direct negotiations.

The Financial Times Wednesday published a column by Richard Haass, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and a top adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell during Bush's first term, in which he called for Washington to make "a fair and generous diplomatic offer" to Iran that would permit it to retain a small uranium enrichment programme, if for no other reason than to rally international opinion behind the U.S. in the event rejects it.

Arguing that the "likely costs of carrying out such an attack substantially outweigh probable benefits", Haass noted that "the most dangerous delusion (among those who support military action) "is that a conflict would be either small or quick."

On Thursday, he was joined by Powell's deputy secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who, in an interview with the Financial Times, also called for direct talks.

"It merits talking to the Iranians about the full range of our relationship ...everything from energy to terrorism to weapons to Iraq," said Armitage, who is considered a strong candidate to take over the Pentagon if Donald Rumsfeld resigns or is forced out.

"We can be diplomatically astute enough to do it without giving anything away," he added, noting that Washington could be patient "for a while" given the estimated five to 10 years the U.S. intelligence community believes it will take before Tehran can obtain a nuclear weapon.

Such statements are anathema to the hawks, who have long depicted any move to engage Iran as equivalent to the appeasement policies toward Hitler of France and Britain in the run-up to World War II.

"Is the America of 2006 more willing to thwart the unacceptable than the France of 1936," asked the title of Kristol's editorial, which, despite the reports of advanced Pentagon planning that included even the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against hardened Iranian targets, asserted that the administration's policy had been "all carrots and no sticks".

His view echoed that of the neo-conservative editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, who said the administration's "alleged war fever is hard to credit, given that for three years the Bush Administration has deferred to Europe in pursuing a diplomatic track on Iran". The Journal said the government must give priority to developing "bunker buster" nuclear bombs.

While Kristol insisted that the "credible threat of force" should initially be used in support of diplomacy with Washington's European allies, he also called for "stepping up intelligence activities, covert operations, special operations, and the like", as well as "operational planning for possible military strikes".

What he had in mind was laid out in a companion article by ret. Air Force Lt. Gen Thomas McInerney, a member of the ultra-hawkish Iran Policy Committee (IPC), entitled "Target: Iran".

If Iran resists diplomatic pressure, according to McInerney, Washington should be prepared to carry out a "powerful air campaign" led by 60 stealth aircraft, and more than 400 non-stealth strike aircraft with roughly 150 refueling tankers and other support aircraft, 100 unmanned aerial vehicles, and 500 cruise missiles to take out some 1,500 nuclear-related and military targets.

Before or during such an attack, he wrote, "a major covert operation could be launched, utilising Iranian exiles and dissident forces trained during the period of diplomacy". The IPC has long advocated support for the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), an Iraq-based paramilitary group listed as a terrorist organisation by the State Department.

In yet another op-ed published in Thursday's Washington Post, Mark Helprin, a novelist and Israeli military veteran, called for anticipating the possibility that U.S. forces in Iraq and its broader interests in the region could be imperiled by Iranian retaliation and popular outrage in the Arab Middle East.

To prepare for such an eventuality, "we would do well to strengthen -- in numbers and mass as well as quality -- the means with which we fight, to reinforce the fleet train with which to supply fighting lines, and to plan for a land route from the Mediterranean across Israel and Jordan to the Tigris and Euphrates."

Such concerns, counseled Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Gulf specialist at AEI, are overblown. In a lengthy analysis of the possible costs of a military attack that was also published in the Standard, he argued that Washington should "not be intimidated by threats of terrorism, oil-price spikes, or hostile world opinion".

"What we are dealing with is a politer, more refined, more cautious, vastly more mendacious version of bin Ladenism," according to the article, entitled "To Bomb, or Not to Bomb: That is the Iran Question". "It is best that such men not have nukes, and that we do everything in our power, including preventive military strikes, to stop this from happening."

But in the overheated atmosphere of current debate over Iran, nothing is quite what it seems. The simulated battle, fought in 2004 and codenamed Hotspur, was in fact one of a series of 'paper exercises' that have been conducted every few weeks by senior military planners on both sides of the Atlantic since the Sixties to test strategic readiness. Each time, a different country is invaded.

To save inventing new topography every time, maps of real countries around the world are used in strict rotation. In July 2004 - before the current president came to power in Tehran - it happened to be Iran. A few weeks ago, it was Scotland. If Tehran is panicking as a result of the story, so too should Edinburgh.

For all that, the story on the front page of yesterday's Guardian is an indication, if not of imminent invasion, of an intense period of smoke and mirrors both in Washington and Tehran: of posturing, lobbying and hyperbole that is as much to do with the domestic politics of the US and Iran, as with the threat posed by either country.

The war talk comes as a new report will argue this week that George Bush's war on terror is itself to blame for the nuclear stand-off over Iran.

The regime in Tehran has concluded, says the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank, that the US is too bogged down fighting the insurgency in Iraq to try to stop the Iranians getting the bomb, making their defiance of the United Nations 'one of the little-noticed consequences of America's failure in Iraq'.

Controversially, it also argues that Iran 'cannot be entirely faulted' for seeking nuclear capability when it feels threatened by US troops in neighbouring countries and saw North Korea, a nuclear power, left untouched while the relatively undefended Iraq was invaded.

Which leaves a fundamental question to be answered. Amid the fanning of the flames by both sides, how real is the prospect of war?

Reading recent headlines, it would seem very real indeed, as they have warned of potential nuclear strikes by the US against Iran's nuclear facilities, floated by the veteran US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and described by the Foreign Office as 'completely nuts'. The reality, however, is far more complex.

In truth the anonymous and warlike noises emanating from Washington reflect a debate about possible military action against Iran that has pitted hawks in the Bush administration - including such senior neo-conservatives as Vice- President Dick Cheney and the US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton - against large segments of the military, intelligence and political establishment.

In fact the debate in America is not over whether the US can or should stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, but on how best to stop them.

At the moment the overwhelming consensus centres on a diplomatic strategy. Yet it is also certain that military options are being studied, if only theoretically.

While insisting that the military option will still be considered, the White House itself has moved sharply to distance itself from reporting on the issue.

There is no doubt, however, that signs emerging from the administration are familiar to any of those following events in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq - not least the building up of the threat posed by Iran by senior administration officials.

To some, the parallels are convincing enough. 'I would expect an attack in the next six months,' says Larry Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's counter-terrorism office. 'This is not just planning for possible military contingencies. There is real planning under way for carrying out a military strike against Iran.'

But many point to the huge problems of carrying out any form of attack - not least that it would fail to destroy much of an Iranian nuclear research programme buried deep underground. Then there is the risk to the US military in Iraq after any attack on Iran. Iran's close links to the majority Shias would likely see a widespread uprising against the US forces.

Finally, such a move would be unlikely to have any international support, except possibly from Israel, which is nervous of the potential consequences from Iran's Hizbollah allies on its northern border.

Such enormous difficulties - and the belief that the US joint chiefs of staff are against an attack - could mean that the public pronouncement and behind-the-scenes leaks and hints are just part of a complex game designed to convince Iran that the threat is real enough to dissuade its nuclear ambitions.

Johnson believes that the key task for US intelligence is to understand the threat of a nuclear Iran. Does Tehran want the bomb to attack US interests and Israel, or is it for self-preservation? 'They have learned the lesson of North Korea. Once you have nuclear weapons, the US sabre-rattling becomes much less. After all, with North Korea you have a genuine madman in control of a country with the bomb and yet we don't hear very much about them at all,' Johnson said.

The real US policy, enunciated by a senior State Department official close to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, revolves around a belief that Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is weaker than his bellicose attitude might suggest and is vulnerable to the pressure of international sanctions.

It is the figure of Ahmadinejad who is at the centre of the conundrum of whether Iran and the US are slipping towards war.

On Friday Ahmadinejad was in Tehran at a conference on Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Such, however, was the international outcry surrounding his announcement three days earlier in the city of Mashhad that Iran had mastered the basics of uranium enrichment, that this subject seemed to be a mere sideshow to Iran's intensifying confrontation with the West.

With the President bearing the triumphal tidings in the presence of the country's atomic energy chief and an assortment of senior mullahs and military top brass, the outward impression was of a regime united in the face of intense pressure from the UN Security Council, which set a 30-day deadline last month for Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment activities.

Such unanimity, however, is by many accounts only superficial. Behind the scenes, a bitter war of words has taken place over Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric.

Hashemi Rafsanjani - the influential former president and a strong advocate of holding official talks with America - is a particular critic and is said to have denounced the President's tactics to his face. Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, has also warned about the international effects of the often-febrile remarks made by Ahmadinejad, who on Friday called yet again for Israel's destruction. Rafsanjani made his feelings clear by trumping the President's announcement in an interview with a Kuwaiti news agency, meaning the news was public hours in advance.

'There are some Iranian leaders, not least Rafsanjani, who think we should act more prudently and who don't approve of this radical trend,' said Dr Sadegh Zibakalam, a politics lecturer at Tehran University. 'They think we should buy friends in the international community by saying, for example, that we understand the anxiety about Iran's nuclear programme, but we can assure the West that it would in no way be intended to move towards an atomic weapon and that Iran is quite prepared to compromise.'

The deep divisions over tone are matched by differences over substance. Some analysts speculate that last week's announcement - having been sold as a historic national achievement - could presage a climbdown that would involve a return to negotiations.

'The main point for Iran throughout has been that voluntary suspension of nuclear activities could deprive it of the opportunity to complete the fuel cycle forever,' one analyst said. 'The West, especially the US, is pressing for a revision to the additional protocol of the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty] that would bar non-fuel-producing countries from pursuing their own cycle. In that context, last week's move can be interpreted as a sign of Iran's willingness to compromise. Even those pushing for a tougher Iranian line agree that we could take several steps ahead before retreating, because then we would have something in our hands to bargain with.'

Zibakalam dismisses this as 'wishful thinking' and says Iran's leaders are determined to push ahead. They may, he says, eventually settle for a deal in which they agree to suspend industrial enrichment of uranium for two to five years while continuing laboratory work under international supervision.

If that is unacceptable to the West, then Iran is facing, at the very least, economic sanctions. Whether ordinary Iranians will take heed is far from certain.

'We have needs other than the nuclear programme from a President who gave many promises to the young people,' said Ali Reza Ghamsari, 36, an official in a shipbuilding company. 'They need jobs and security. It's better for Iran to negotiate and co-ordinate its actions with the international community. I think the majority of the nation asks for such a thing. Otherwise, there is a high probability of sanctions and the President won't be able to deliver his promises.'

Mr Peres was speaking a day after Mr Ahmadinejad told a Palestinian solidarity conference in Tehran: "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading towards annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm. Our power is growing, while the Zionists' power of resistance is growing weaker. Israel is a danger, but that danger is about to end."

Last week, Mr Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium and would soon be able to build an atomic bomb. It has already tested delivery systems that could reach Israel and other Middle Eastern states.

The Institute for Science and International Security, an American think-tank, published satellite photographs yesterday showing that Iran has built a new tunnel entrance to a uranium conversion laboratory in Isfahan and has reinforced two cascade halls - in which uranium is enriched in centrifuges - against aerial attack.

"This entrance is indicative of a new underground facility or further expansion of existing ones," said the ISIS. Its director, David Albright, a former UN arms inspector, added: "Iran is taking extraordinary precautions to try to protect its nuclear assets."

Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism chief, warned the Bush administration against a military strike on Iranian reactors. President George Bush has dismissed reports of such plans as "wild speculation". Mr Clarke, who has advised three presidents, wrote in The New York Times: "A conflict with Iran could be even more damaging to our interests than the current struggle in Iraq has been." He recalled that the Clinton administration had also considered a bombing campaign against Iran amid tensions in the 1990s, but "after a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States". Although Israel has not excluded a rerun of its 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad, it is rattling no sabres. It prefers to play a supporting role in efforts to isolate the Islamic republic.

Mr Peres cautioned: "Israel needs to let the United States and the international community lead the campaign to defend world peace from the Iranian leader. We must not let Israel stand at the head of the campaign, since then it will be perceived as an Israeli-Iranian issue and could lead to an end of international pressure." Nonetheless, senior Israeli military intelligence officers complain that the international response is too weak. "Iran spat in the world's face," one of them told The Jerusalem Post, "but the world hasn't done anything. The way it looks now, it is doubtful that the United Nations and the international efforts will succeed in stopping Iran."

* With infighting between the old and new regimes tearing Palestinian politics apart, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister, has appealed to rival parties to join a national unity coalition. "The door is open to Fatah," a spokesman said. But President Mahmoud Abbas's party, which declined to attend an emergency meeting in Gaza, is in no hurry to agree.

Speaking in a mosque on Friday, Mr Haniyeh accused the President of forging "an unholy alliance" with the international community, which is boycotting Hamas officials, to bring down his government. Fatah spokesmen blamed Hamas for destroying the Palestinian economy and urged the Islamic movement to endorse previous agreements with Israel.

A recent article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker suggested the same.

But the U.S. media seems less concerned than the British over the issue.

News headlines on the British media are mostly booked for the Iranian nuclear issue, which didn't even make the front pages of the Washington Post or New York Times.

Will there be a war on Iran or not?

War would be a surprise for the British people, who don't expect their leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair, to dare repeat Iraq mistake, but in the U.S., the situation is a bit different.

Many questions surround the issue of a possible U.S. war on Iran.

Will European allies support the U.S. this time? Will Bush's admin allow the use of nuclear weapons against the country to knock down its nuclear program?

Washington is already working from the assumption that the U.S. will attack Iran, possibly using nuclear weapons during this presidency. Also, like what happened in Iraq, the Bush administration is expected to have the support of Britain and Australia in this war.

Regarding the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, this has become an issue of a heated debate in Washington these days, with struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots, the editorial adds.

The U.S. is divided between these two camps. Those two camps represent senior members of the Bush administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks.

Recently, it's been reported that the U.S. Secretary of Condoleezza Rice has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and is on the verge of abandoning the ideological ship - just as the former Secretary of State Colin Powell did in private meeting over Iraq, and later on announced his resignation.

While the first faction agrees with the British, French and German view which prefers isolating Iran diplomatically rather than militarily, and supports imposing UN Security Council sanctions on Iran. The second faction includes all those who agree with the unwise policies of the American President which prefers using force to implement his agenda, no matter what.

While many officials, including those in the UN, believe the American President can and will press the nuclear button, many others in Washington believe that "an all-powerful establishment, from the might of the top brass at the Pentagon to the consensus wisdom of practically every senior politician, will prevail against even an out-of-control president."

With circulating media reports suggesting that the U.S. Department of Defense is actively considering to Iranian cities using nuclear weapons, it becomes clear that the U.S. current President, Mr. George W. Bush is a falling victim to the same lack of imagination that led John F. Kennedy imagine he could attack China to keep it from producing a nuclear bomb without igniting a major war.

What's also worrying is the catastrophic possibility that Bush will form another "coalition of the willing" by teaming up with Israel in a joint attack on the Islamic Republic.

Kennedy's failure 45 years ago to understand the consequence of his unwise plan to bomb China in circumstances remarkably like today's shows how easily Bush could fall into a major new war in the Middle East.

The money will help the Palestinian Authority. It has has been in desperate financial trouble since Israel stopped turning over $55 million US per month in taxes it collects for the authority and since international donors froze hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding.

The donors - including the United States, the European Union and Canada - say they will resume the cash flow if the newly elected Hamas government changes its policies by recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and accepting peace plans endorsed by the previous Fatah government.

So far, Hamas has refused, even though some of the 140,000 Palestinian civil servants rioted Saturday to protest against their second week without pay.

Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal, who was at the Tehran meeting, again repeated that position on Saturday. "We never will recognize Israel," he said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.

Iran has long supported the Palestinians and been strongly anti-Israel.

"Cutting the West's financial aid to Palestine would not affect the will of the Palestinian people," the TV broadcast quoted Mottaki as saying.

The Palestinian Authority, which performs many of the functions of a government, is the largest employer in the West Bank and Gaza.

Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years ago. Western analysts long suspected that Iran had a second, secret program - based on the black market offerings of the renegade Pakistani nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan - separate from the activity at its main nuclear facility at Natanz. But they had no proof.

Then on Thursday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Tehran was "presently conducting research" on the P-2 centrifuge, boasting that it would quadruple Iran's enrichment powers. The centrifuges are tall, thin machines that spin very fast to enrich, or concentrate, uranium's rare component, uranium 235, which can fuel nuclear reactors or atom bombs.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's statements, and those of other senior Iranian officials, are always viewed with suspicion by American and international nuclear experts, because Iran has, at various times, understated nuclear activities that were later discovered, and overstated its capabilities. Analysts and American intelligence officials, bruised by their experience in Iraq, say they are uncertain whether Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim represents a real technical advance that could accelerate Iran's nuclear agenda, or political rhetoric meant to convince the world of the unstoppability of its atomic program.

European diplomats said a delegation of Iranian officials is due to arrive on Tuesday in Vienna, where the International Atomic Energy Agency will press them to address the new enrichment claim, as well as other questions about Iran's program, including a crude bomb design found in the country.

"This is a much better machine," a European diplomat said of the advanced centrifuge, which was a centerpiece of Pakistan's efforts to build its nuclear weapons and was found in 2004 in Libya, when that country gave up its nuclear program. The diplomat added that the Iranians, among other questions, will now have to explain whether Mr. Ahmadinejad was right, and if so, whether they recently restarted the abandoned program or have been pursuing it in secret for years.

If Iran moved beyond research and actually began running the machines, it could force American intelligence agencies to revise their estimates of how long it would take for Iran to build an atom bomb - an event they now put somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Robert Joseph, the Bush administration's under secretary of state for arms control and international security, who is known as one of the administration's hawks, said in an interview on Saturday that President Ahmadinejad's claim constituted "the first time I've ever heard the Iranians admit" to have a significant effort on the advanced technology. Iran, Mr. Joseph added, "has never come clean on this program, and now its president is talking about it."

The new claim focuses renewed attention on Iran's rocky relationship with Mr. Khan, who provided it with much of the enrichment technology it is exploiting today. If Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim is correct, it probably indicates that relationship went on longer and far deeper than previously acknowledged. Mr. Khan and his nuclear black market supplied Iran with blueprints for both the more elementary machine, known as P-1, and the more advanced P-2.

There are other indications that Mr. Khan may have been dealing with Iran as recently as six years ago. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan disclosed recently that he fired Dr. Khan, a national hero credited with developing Pakistan's bomb, in 2001 after discovering that he was trying to arrange a secret flight to the Iranian city of Zahedan, known as a center of smuggling.

Dr. Khan refused to discuss the flight, saying it was important and very secret. "I said, 'What the hell do you mean? You want to keep a secret from me?' " Mr. Musharraf recalled in an interview with The New York Times for a Discovery Times television documentary, "Nuclear Jihad."

"So these are the things which led me to very concrete suspicions," Mr. Musharraf said, "and we removed him."

Last year, Pakistan said its investigation into the Khan network was closed. But the Iranian crisis has led to renewed questioning of Dr. Khan, American intelligence officials and European diplomats say.

So far his answers have been vague, investigators say. Iran, for its part, has said virtually nothing about its P-2 program. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London, said in a report last year that Iran's failure to provide more information about its P-2 program led many analysts to suspect that the advanced centrifuges formed "the nucleus of a secret enrichment program."

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private research group in Washington that monitors the Iranian program, said Mr. Ahmadinejad's declaration, whether political rhetoric or technical reality, now gave the world "something to further investigate and worry about."

Tehran says its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and meant for producing nuclear power.

But the Bush administration argues otherwise. "A. Q. Khan was not in the business of civil nuclear power development," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview for the documentary. "Why, if you only intended a civil nuclear program, would you have lied about activities at Natanz?" Later she added, "Why are they still unwilling to answer some of the questions that the I.A.E.A. has?"

The P-2 mystery began years ago when Iran told international inspectors that it had received plans for the advanced centrifuges around 1994 but had done nothing with them until 2002, when it hired an Iranian contractor to try to make the complex machines.

The P-2, a second-generation Pakistani model, was the most advanced centrifuge sold by Dr. Khan's network. With superstrong rotors, it could spin faster and enrich uranium faster.

Iran repeatedly denied receiving any P-2 centrifuges from Dr. Khan, which would greatly ease the making of duplicates. Moreover, it said it did no research on the production of the advanced centrifuges between 1995 and 2002 because of management changes in its nuclear program and a lack of skilled personnel.

In report after report, the I.A.E.A. has questioned that explanation. For instance, last September it said the Iranian contractor, who allegedly first saw the P-2 plans in 2002, made considerable research progress "within a short period," which seemed to undermine Iran's claim of doing no past research.

Iran said that the research failed to produce operating machines and that it ended the experimental P-2 work in 2003 and instead focused on the easier P-1 design.

But scraps of evidence gathered by the international agency and the accounts of some members of the Khan network have cast doubt on those denials. As recently as last Thursday, when the director general of the agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, visited Tehran, he insisted on detailed answers during a private meeting, diplomats briefed on the meeting said.

Suspicions arose because inspectors knew that Dr. Khan had supplied Libya and North Korea with actual P-2 centrifuges in the late 1990's, and they repeatedly heard that he had done likewise with Iran.

B. S .A. Tahir, the chief operating officer of the Khan network, now in prison in Malaysia, has reportedly said that Iran received far more P-2 technology than it has admitted and that some shipments took place after Dr. Khan and the Iranians supposedly ceased doing business around 1995.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Thursday, just hours after Mr. Ahmadinejad's claim, senior intelligence officials said they had seen nothing yet that would lead them to revise their estimate that Iran is still five to 10 years away from making a weapon.

Kenneth C. Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, created to track programs like Iran's and North Korea's, cautioned against accepting at face value Tehran's recent claims about producing enriched uranium and plans to produce 54,000 centrifuges.

"It will take many years," he said, "to build that many."

At the same time, intelligence reports circulating inside the American government, according to several officials who were granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, have raised questions of whether the Iranian government's decision to boast about its progress is part of an effort to hide more significant activity.

They suspect that a clandestine program, if it exists, would concentrate on the P-2 because it can produce enriched uranium so fast.

I.A.E.A. officials say solving the mystery of the P-2 shipments has become one of the most critical issues on which they need answers in the next two weeks, before Mr. ElBaradei issues a report to the United Nations Security Council on April 28.

Other pressing questions include Iran's reluctance to discuss a document found by inspectors - one that the Iranians were not willing to let the inspectors take out of the country - that sketches out how to shape uranium into perfect spheres, the tell-tale shape for a primitive weapon. Investigators say that document, too, appears to have come from the Khan network.

It is also unclear whether Dr. Khan sold the Iranians a complete Chinese-made bomb design similar to the one Libya turned over to the United States when it gave up its weapons program. Questions about other copies of the bomb design have been met with silence, in Iran and in Pakistan.

"Frankly, I don't know whether he has passed these bomb designs to others," Mr. Musharraf said. Even under a loose form of house arrest for the past two years, he said, Dr. Khan "sometimes has been hiding the facts."

Why would they invite more intrusive inspections allowing the UN to ferret through every inch of Iranian territory in an attempt to uncover every armory, radar station, and missile site before the inevitable US bombing? Why would they endure the humiliation of being singled out and scorned for complying with the NPT when nuclear cheaters like India are rewarded with praise and offered banned nuclear technology by Washington?

No thanks.

The Security Council is looking for a peaceful way out of the standoff, so they are bending as much as possible, but, make no mistake, there will be no sanctions, no Chapter 7 resolutions, and no outright ban on Iran enriching uranium.

It won’t happen.

In fact, as nuclear scientist Gordon Prather reports, the Security Council actually confirmed Iran’s right to enrich uranium in a terse Presidential Statement which they issued after two weeks of deliberation:

"The Security Council reaffirms its commitment to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons and recalls the right of States Party, in conformity with articles I and II of that Treaty, to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination”.

Should we be surprised that not one newspaper in the western press printed this astonishing vindication of Iran’s conduct under the terms of the NPT?

The media routinely characterizes Iran’s behavior as “defiance”, as if anyone who stands in the way of American foreign policy is inherently evil. In fact, there is an important principle involved in Iran’s response that is never adequately explored. The right to enrich uranium is the central tenet of the NPT. That is why in the language of the treaty, it is referred to as an “inalienable right”. This point is oftentimes overlooked but it is crucial to understanding the true spirit of the treaty. Every nation is entitled to the full benefits of nuclear technology as long as they comply with inspections that ensure their programs are strictly being used for peaceful purposes.

There’s no way to strip “enrichment” out of the NPT and still have a treaty that means anything. . Without the prospect of enrichment, there is no incentive for countries to join the NPT. The signatory would simply be accepting an apartheid system which rewards nuclear states without any practical benefits for the non-nuclear members. It is the right to utilize nuclear technology without developing nuclear weapons that makes the treaty attractive.

For the United States to say that they want Iran to forgo enrichment is the same as saying they want to unilaterally repeal the treaty.

For Iran, this is totally unacceptable. It is the equivalent of buying a car from a dealership only to discover that the steering wheel, engine, and transmission have been removed.

Iran has fully complied with the most rigorously monitored inspections in the history of the IAEA. They have willingly submitted to “additional protocols” negotiated with the EU-3 (Germany, France and England) as a way of allaying concerns about noncompliance and to build confidence among the members of the international community. Their eagerness to negotiate in good faith was intentionally subverted by the Bush administration which has stubbornly refused to provide any of the security guarantees that Iran sought in exchange for sacrificing its rights. Iran wants a non-aggression pact from the Bush administration, something that Washington is unprepared to offer.

At no point, have the inspections produced “any evidence” that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons or diverting nuclear material from its use in peaceful technology. This hasn’t stopped the administration from pursuing an aggressive media strategy to feed public hysteria.

Will it work?

Iran’s struggle represents a fundamental clash between the rights of individual sovereign states and an increasingly mettlesome superpower. No one disputes that the NPT allows its members to enrich uranium. The dispute is whether or not the United States can arbitrarily overturn international law and rescind a treaty for a nation it simply dislikes.

Treaties are the foundation blocks upon which the international order rests; without them we are doomed to an endless cycle of bloody conflicts. Iran’s demand that its rights be respected is in fact a defense of the basic principle which underscores civilization itself; that even the weakest among us can take refuge in the law. The Mullahs are right to think that that is a principle worth fighting for.

It includes a scenario for a land invasion of the country led by the U.S. Marine Corps, a detailed analysis of the Iranian missile force and a global strike plan against any Iranian weapons of mass destruction, Arkin wrote in The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, Iran appears convinced it can deter or even win a military confrontation with the United States, with the Islamic regime buoyed by high oil prices, support from militants across the region and American woes in Iraq.

The regime gave fresh signals yesterday that it was in no mood for a compromise over its disputed nuclear programme, with officials openly flouting a UN Security Council demand for a freeze in uranium enrichment by April 28.

U.S. and British planners have already conducted a Caspian Sea war game as part of these preparations, the scholar said.

"According to military sources close to the planning process, this task was given to Army General John Abizaid, now commander of CENTCOM, in 2002," Arkin wrote, referring to the Florida-based U.S. Central Command.

But preparations under TIRANNT began in earnest in May 2003, when modelers and intelligence specialists pulled together the data needed for theater-level warfare analysis for Iran, he said.

This effort has never stopped. The plan has since been updated using information collected in Iraq, the analyst pointed out.

Air Force planners have modeled attacks against existing Iranian air defenses and targets, while Navy planners have evaluated coastal defenses and drawn up scenarios for keeping control of the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the oil-rich Gulf.

A follow-on TIRANNT analysis, which began in October 2003, calculated the results of different scenarios for action against Iran to provide options to U.S. commanders, Arkin wrote.

The Marines, meanwhile, have come up with their own document called "Concept of Operations" that explores the possibility of moving forces from ship to shore against a determined enemy without establishing a beachhead first.

"Though the Marine Corps enemy is described only as a deeply religious revolutionary country named Karona, it is, with its Revolutionary Guards, WMD and oil wealth, unmistakably meant to be Iran," Arkin said.

Various scenarios involving Iran's missile force have also been examined in another study, initiated in 2004 and known as BMD-I, which is short for "ballistic missile defense -- Iran", Arkin said.

In June 2004, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld alerted the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, to be prepared to implement CONPLAN 8022, a global strike plan that includes Iran.

"The new task force, sources have told me, mostly worries that if it were called upon to deliver 'prompt' global strikes against certain targets in Iran under some emergency circumstances, the president might have to be told that the only option is a nuclear one," Arkin said.

"But after long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favorably for the United States," the two experts wrote in Sunday's New York Times.

They warned Iran could retaliate against any U.S. military action by using its terrorist networks "that are far superior to anything Al-Qaeda was ever able to field."

It comes at a time of escalating confrontation between Iran and the United States over Iran's nuclear program, exacerbated by reports, which the administration has played down, that military contingency plans are being reviewed as well.

While the United States has marshaled international support for diplomatic pressure on Iran, some Asian and European allies have expressed misgivings about other avenues of pressure, which are seen as aimed at undermining the government in Tehran.

One Asian diplomat said the effort was reminiscent of the subsidies the United States provided to Iraqi exile groups in the 1990's. "They don't call it 'regime change,' but that is obviously what it is," he said. But he had to be promised anonymity before he would discuss it, not wanting to create a public rift between his country and the United States on a significant matter of foreign policy.

To find people to promote change in Iran, the State Department has opened a competition for grant applications. A Web site announcement says that applicants "must outline activities linked to reform and demonstrate how the proposed approach would achieve sustainable impact in Iran."

A State Department official said that numerous applications had come in and that the department would have little trouble spending the $25 million in the next year. But he acknowledged that various groups were squabbling over how best to promote reform and who would be most effective in doing so.

"Iran is governed by an unelected clerical elite not accountable to the people," the official said, speaking anonymously under ground rules imposed by the department. "But despite considerable personal risk, we are seeing some activists willing to step forward."

The biggest problem for the applicants is the amount of risk they might incur. There have been reports in Iran of advocates of change being arrested after having met with American officials at conferences, though some experts charge that Iran has exaggerated those reports in order to discourage contacts with the West.

Other experts said that some of the people who were stepping forward might not be the best ones to get the money.

"It sounds good to fund civil society groups, but not when you don't know who the groups are," said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian-born professor of national affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "No real group wants a direct affiliation with the United States. It will just get them into trouble with the government."

Administration officials said a few top American officials had been traveling the country, particularly to Los Angeles, to meet with Iranian exile organizations, many of them supporters of the monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in 1979. Some of the Los Angeles groups operate satellite radio and television stations that beam programs into Iran.

But State Department officials said they were not likely to enlist groups associated with the monarchy because, in their view, they do not seem to have much support in Iran.

Lorne W. Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, a foundation linked to the Republican Party, said, "There are plenty of people out there who have a checkered past who you would not want to work with."

The institute, which receives money from Congress and grants from the State Department, has in the last couple of years linked up with groups and individuals in Iran and offered them training at places outside the country. The groups cannot be identified for fear of their safety, he said.

State Department officials and various advocates for change consulted by the department said that for now the money would probably be concentrated on groups seeking to document human rights abuses and promote women's and labor rights, rather than groups seeking direct political change.

Recipients of such financing in the past said that in order to operate they had to avoid the perception that they are tools of "regime change."

"The administration has consulted many Iranians just to find out who to talk to," said Roya Boroumand, co-director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, which seeks to document human rights abuses inside Iran. "We try not to be in touch with too many people inside Iran because we know it could be fatal."

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a new group based in New Haven, has received $1 million from the State Department and could receive more, officials said. But leaders of the group emphasize that while they have contacts with people in Iran, it is not for the purpose of overthrowing the government.

"We are pro-human rights, but we are not directly seeking regime change," said Maura Johnson, the center's executive director. "That's not our agenda. When you look at many other countries, improved human rights can occur without regime change, through reforms and stronger institutions."

At a recruiting station in Tehran recently, volunteers for the force had to show their birth certificates, give proof of their address and tick a box stating whether they would prefer to attack American targets in Iraq or Israeli targets.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned last Friday that Israel was heading towards "annihilation". He was speaking at a Tehran conference on Palestinian rights aimed at promoting Iran as a new Middle Eastern superpower.

According to western intelligence documents leaked to The Sunday Times, the Revolutionary Guards are in charge of a secret nuclear weapons programme designed to evade the scrutiny of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

One of the leaked reports, dating from February this year, confirms that President George W Bush is preparing to strike Iran. "If the problem is not resolved in some way, he intends to act before leaving office because it would be 'unfair' to leave the task of destroying Iran's nuclear facilities to a new president," the document says.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a former spokesman for National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an opposition group, said a secret, parallel military programme was under way. According to sources inside Iran, the Revolutionary Guards were constructing underground sites that could be activated if Iran's known nuclear facilities were destroyed.

The NCRI is the political wing of the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, which is deemed a terrorist organisation in Britain and America. However, much of its information is considered to be "absolutely credible" by western intelligence sources after Jafarzadeh revealed the existence of the Natanz plant in 2002.

Within the past year, 14 large and several smaller projects have been created, according to Jafarzadeh. Several are designed to be nuclear factories; others are for the storage of weapons, he claimed.