Disarmament Documentation

'I've got no intention of bombing their nuclear installations or anything else', British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Iran, May 3, 2005

Excerpt from the transcript of an interview with Jon Snow, Channel Four News, broadcast live on May 3, 2005.

Jon Snow: You yourself have said that no prime minister takes a more serious decision than to go to war. Say for example you could offer the guarantee that Britain will not launch any pre-emptive strike on Iran?

Tony Blair: I have been through this over and over again...

Jon Snow: We heard Jack Straw say it, we haven't heard you say it.

Tony Blair: I was asked about it on the television last night and I said it was absurd to think that we are going to go invade Iran. Iran is not Iraq..

Jon Snow: But can you say specifically you are not going to bomb their nuclear installations?

Tony Blair: We are not going to launch any sort of invasion of Iran. What I am not going to do is sit here and guess at every set of circumstances I may ever have to give, no prime minister can do that.

Jon Snow: But can you say specifically you are not going to bomb their nuclear installations?

Tony Blair: I've got no intention of bombing their nuclear installations or anything else. You know, Iran is a problem incidentally on nuclear weapons, let's be under no doubt or illusion about that at all. However we have got a process fortunately in Iran where you've got France, Germany the UK and America are working on the same side together. All I'm trying to do when I put forward the case of democracy happening in Iraq is there is something odd when I've been going around in the election campaign and people here saying to me this is a terrible thing you have done to Iraq and Iraqis fighting, usually unsuccessfully, to get on our media saying, hang on a minute, our country is liberated, we can now become a stable partner for the region.

Source: Channel 4 News, http://www.channel4.com/news/

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