Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, called the idea of a nuclear strike ''completely nuts."
Dan Bartlett, counselor to Bush, cautioned against reading too much into administration planning. ''The president's priority is to find a diplomatic solution to a problem the entire world recognizes," Bartlett said yesterday. ''And those who are drawing broad, definitive conclusions based on normal defense and intelligence planning are ill informed and are not knowledgeable of the administration's thinking on Iran."
Specialists say US forces are preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan and an attack against Iran could inflame US problems in the Muslim world.
Straw, in an interview with the BBC, said Britain would not launch a preemptive strike on Iran and he was as ''certain as he could be" that the United States also would not. He said he strongly suspects Iran is developing a civil nuclear capability that also could be used for nuclear weapons, but there is ''no smoking gun."
He called military action ''an infinitely worse option and there's no justification for it."
The UN Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment program. But Iran has refused to halt its nuclear activity, saying the small-scale enrichment project was strictly for research, not weapons.
Bush has emphasized that diplomacy is always preferable, but he has defended his administration's strike-first policy against terrorists and other enemies.
