CAIRO, Egypt – Secretary of State Rice yesterday declined to deny a London Sunday Telegraph story alleging that America has recently stepped up its planning to bomb suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. In an interview with ABC News, Ms. Rice said the world should want the president “to keep options on the table.”

The news of American contingency planning comes after Tehran backed down from a threat to withdraw from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The Associated Press yesterday reported that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency were to leave shortly for a mission to Iran to determine exactly what seals and monitoring devices remained on the country’s uranium enrichment facilities. A diplomat confirmed to the wire that some such safeguards had been removed in the last week.

President Bush for almost two years has instructed his diplomats to tell Iran’s interlocutors and in some cases their envoys to make general threats to the Islamic Republic regarding its nuclear program if it withdrew from diplomacy. In 2004, the Pentagon began scouting out a location in the Holang desert in Afghanistan on Iran’s border as a possible Afghan airbase. Several bases also exist in Iraq currently used for the U.S. Airforce that could be suitable for an attack on Iran’s scattered nuclear facilities.

When asked about the latest story in the London Telegraph, which said the Pentagon’s planning involved deploying B-52 bombers from America for the sorties, Ms. Rice said, “The President never takes any of his options off the table. People shouldn’t want the President of the United States to take options off the table. But there is a diplomatic solution to this. Now that we are in the Security Council, there are many steps that the Security Council can take, authority that the Security Council has, to help enforce IAEA requirements on Iran.”

The earlier diplomatic solution has been roundly rejected by the regime in Tehran. In the last five weeks, Iran has rejected an offer from the Russians to enrich their uranium and then allow the country – the world’s third largest exporter of unrefined petroleum – to use it for reactors. Iran has also spurned European negotiations that made a similar offer of monitored enrichment and use of the nuclear material for energy purposes.

Yesterday the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Hamid Reza Asefi said Iran had no intentions of withdrawing from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, undermining veiled threats from Iran’s president on Saturday. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday said in a speech, “If we see you want to violate the right of the Iranian people by using those regulations (against us), you should know that the Iranian people will revise its policies,” according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Asefi, however, warned Europe from acceding, as they already have, to referring his country to the United Nations. “Do not stop at the U.N. Security Council station, because staying there would not be helpful,” Mr. Asefi said. “We have made the necessary preparations and have not been taken by surprise.” He also added that such a referral would hurt European nations, which enjoy commercial ties with Iran, more than it would hurt Iran, which lacks the capacity to refine most of its petroleum.

Rumors of pending attacks from either Israel or America on Iran over its nuclear program have circulated for more than two years, particularly in the British press. Israel’s capacity for such a strike would require the tacit if not explicit consent from Iran’s neighbors, not to mention Jordan, to allow the Jewish state to fly over sovereign airspace.

If Israel decided on such an attack, as former Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would plan if he won elections in March, they would likely have to use F-15’s or F-16’s that America sold to Israel in 2004. Those planes would still however need to be refueled in mid-air in such an attack.

America however has more options. In the event of an American air strike, there would be heavy political consequences if it was launched from Iraq – a country ruled by an elected coalition of religious Shiite parties whose militias were trained and funded by Iran while Saddam was in power. Iran’s main nuclear facility, that it had kept hidden from the international community until 2003 in Natanz, is largely underground and would require projectile explosives capable of burrowing into the earth, known colloquially as bunker busters.

European, Israeli, and American intelligence have suspected for a long time that Iran has a parallel military nuclear program it has kept hidden from the IAEA. In this case, the likely target list for any bombing run would stem from both spotty intelligence on Iran and the extensive reports from the U.N. inspectors.

Last month in an interview, the chairman of Israel’s national security and foreign policy committee, Yuval Steinitz, said he believed Iran was 18 months away from an atomic bomb. Official American and Israeli estimates are less pessimistic, placing the point of no return further away.