JERUSALEM, Jan 12, (Agencies): Only the convincing threat of military action headed by the United States will persuade Iran to drop plans to build an atomic bomb, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
Netanyahu appeared to downplay recent Israeli intelligence assessment that Tehran’s nuclear programme faced delays and urged foreign powers to pile pressure on the Iranian authorities.
Speaking to foreign journalists, he said that although the latest round of international sanctions were hurting Iran, they would not be enough to force a u-turn on nuclear weapons.
“You have to ratchet up the pressure and ... I don’t think that this pressure will be sufficient to have this regime change course without a credible military option that is put before them by the international communitly led by the United States,” he said.
The West believes that Iran aims to use its uranium enrichment program to build atomic weapons. Tehran denies this.
Both Israel and the United States have said all options remain on the table, but many analysts believe the threat of military intervention has receded amid signs that Iran’s contested nuclear programme is suffering from sabotage, sanctions and technical glitches.
Israel’s outgoing spy chief told reporters last week that he did not believe Iran would be able to build a nuclear bomb before 2015 and counselled against any pre-emptive military strikes.
A political source said Netanyahu was very unhappy with the departing Mossad director Meir Dagan for airing his views in public and the prime minister shrugged off his comments on Tuesday.

Talks
Talks next week between Iran and major powers concerned about its nuclear programme could be the “last chance” for the West because Tehran’s atomic capability is improving, a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Tehran’s nuclear ambassador, raised the stakes for the Jan 21-22 meeting with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, which want assurances that Iran is not trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Once Iran can make its own fuel for a research reactor, which it has said will happen this year, it may not return to negotiations if the talks to be held in Istanbul fail, the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying on Wednesday.
“It might be the last chance because by installing fuel rods produced by Iran in the core of the Tehran Research Reactor, probably parliament will not allow the government to negotiate or send its uranium outside the country and the Istanbul meeting might be the last chance for the West to return to talks.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the ultimate say on its nuclear policy and diplomacy.
A similar round of talks concluded in October 2009 with a tentative pact for Iran to export some of its low-enriched uranium in exchange for fuel rods made from higher-enriched, 20 percent uranium to run the reactor which makes medical isotopes.
But that deal, meant as a confidence-building step leading to further talks, unravelled when Tehran backed away from the terms, ultimately triggering a new wave of sanctions which some analysts say helped push Tehran back to the negotiating table.
Acting Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said on Saturday that Iran would be able to produce its own fuel material for the Tehran reactor later this year, making any swap deal “lose its meaning”.
Iran will not talk on its “nuclear dossier” at the Istanbul talks with world powers, atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi said in comments published Wednesday, reiterating Tehran’s long-standing policy.
“We will absolutely not recognise the negotiation if the other side wants to negotiate on the issue of the nuclear dossier” of Iran, Salehi said in an interview with state-run Iran newspaper.

Meanwhile, Iran’s opposition leader on Wednesday denounced the country’s ruling system for being ‘totalitarian’ like the old Nazi and Soviet regimes, with lying to its people being its defining characteristic.
Mir Hossein Mousavi statement comes as reaction to a stepped up campaign by the ruling system to discredit opposition leaders, calling them traitors that would ultimately be prosecuted.
“They are resorting to methods (against the opposition) used in totalitarian regimes like Stalin in the Soviet era or (former dictator Nicolae) Ceausescu in Romania,” Mousavi said in a statement posted on his website.
He added that the propaganda statements of Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany paled in significance to the lying done by Iran’s rulers.
“They’ve surpassed Goebbels in telling lies. Leveling accusations and telling lies is part of their ossified faith,” he said.
Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi, said last month that it was only a matter of time before opposition leaders are put on trial for the unrest following the disputed 2009 presidential election.
Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi — who both ran in the disputed 2009 presidential elections — as well as former reformist President Mohammad Khatami are already banned from leaving the country.