Chirac retracts relaxed comments on nuclear Iran

Peter Walker
The Guardian
Feb. 01, 2007

The French president, Jacques Chirac, has said a nuclear-armed Iran would not be "very dangerous", in controversial comments he retracted the next day.

In an interview conducted on Monday and published today, Mr Chirac contradicted official French policy by saying that even if Iran possessed an atomic weapon this would not be perilous, since it would never dare to use it.

"Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?" he asked reporters from the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

"It would not have gone 200 metres into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed."

Both US-run papers, which ran lengthy extracts from the interview today, said they had been summoned back yesterday to the president's Paris residence, where he retracted many of the comments.

Mr Chirac said had been speaking casually about Iran the previous day, believing he had been talking off the record, and "should rather have paid attention to what I was saying".

However, the newspapers said the interview was taped and clearly intended for publication today, when Le Nouvel Observateur, which also printed the comments, is published.

The newspapers share resources and printed very similar, jointly written stories. Each hinted strongly that Mr Chirac, 74, had appeared to be in less than full command of his faculties during the initial interview.

According to the papers, in the first interview Mr Chirac "appeared distracted at times, grasping for names and dates and relying on advisers to fill in the blanks. His hands shook slightly."

They added: "By contrast, in the second interview, which came just after lunch, he appeared both confident and comfortable with the subject matter."

In September 2005, Mr Chirac was admitted to hospital for what officials would only call a "little vascular incident", leading many to speculate he had had a minor stroke.

In his Monday interview, Mr Chirac argued that the main danger of Iran's controversial nuclear programme lay not in its acquiring atomic weapons but in the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the region.

"What is very dangerous is proliferation," he warned. "This means that if Iran continues in the direction it has taken and totally masters nuclear-generated electricity, the danger does not lie in the bomb it will have, and which will be of no use to it.

"It is really very tempting for other countries in the region that have large financial resources to say: 'Well, we too are going to do that; we're going to help others do it.'

"Why wouldn't Saudi Arabia do it? Why wouldn't it help Egypt to do so as well? That is the real danger."

His comments are in contrast to official French policy, which opposes any acquisition of nuclear weapons by Tehran.

After the interview, Mr Chirac's office issued a heavily edited transcript that excluded his views on a nuclear Iran and added, the papers said, a comment that was not in their recordings, reading: "I do not see what type of scenario could justify Iran's recourse to an atomic bomb."

When he recalled the correspondents yesterday, Mr Chirac contradicted many of his previous statements, for example, that Tehran would be attacked in the event of an Iranian nuclear strike.

Of his initial suggestion that Israel could be the target of an Iranian attack, he said: "I don't think I spoke about Israel yesterday. Maybe I did so, but I don't think so. I have no recollection of that."