It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.