Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, delivered a formal letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan in May 2006, accusing American officials of making unlawful threats of military force against the Islamic Republic.
The letter cited recent US newspaper reports, including an April 2006 New Yorker article claiming the Bush administration was planning a large-scale bombing campaign against Iran. A Washington Post report made similar claims. Particularly alarming to Tehran were suggestions that American planners had explored the use of nuclear bunker-busting weapons to target Iranian atomic sites.
Iran argued that Washington's failure to deny those reports amounted to an escalation, calling on the UN Security Council to address what it described as illegal rhetoric and take prompt, decisive action.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the published reports as fiction, yet the US government declined to formally exclude the military option, maintaining that it preferred a diplomatic resolution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear program. Iran has consistently maintained that its atomic activities are intended solely for civilian energy production.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in May 2006, in its own words.