NEW YORK, Nov 19: The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has found no strong evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, New Yorker magazine said in a report on Sunday.

A top-secret CIA analysis contradicted the belief of President George Bush's administration that Tehran is working on a nuclear bomb, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in an article for the Nov 27 edition of the New Yorker magazine.

Mr Hersh, who has crossed swords with the Bush administration over the issue of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and with the revelations of the Abu-Ghraib torture prisons, has been right on most issues.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic _Energy_ Agency," Mr Hersh wrote in New Yorker.

The analysis was carried out using _satellite_ (http://www. playfuls.com/bizworld/) photos and the testing of water and smoke from suspected sites for traces of radioactivity. No significant amount was detected.

Mr Hersh says that a high-ranking security source had confirmed the existence of the report and said that the Bush administration, particularly Vice President

Dick Cheney and his aides, rejected the findings, believing instead that the Iranian nuclear weapons programme is merely well hidden.

The US and other western nations believe that the Iranian uranium enrichment programme is aimed at building nuclear weapons which will threaten Israel. But the United States has never challenged Israel’s nuclear arsenal which reportedly stands between 200 to 300 nuclear warheads. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the reports.