BERLIN, April 28: A rain of missiles could degrade Iran's nuclear programme and set it back years, Israel's prime minister told a German weekly, sparking a warning from Tehran that such a strike would be a dangerous “error”.

“It may not be possible to destroy all of the Iranian nuclear programme, but it is possible to damage to in such a way it would be set back several years,” Ehud Olmert told the magazine Focus in an interview to be published on Monday.

“It's technically feasible. It would require 10 days and the launch of a thousand Tomahawk missiles,” he said, according to excerpts made available on Saturday.

Olmert said “nobody could exclude” military action against Iran if the Islamic republic continued to defy UN resolutions calling for a halt to sensitive atomic work feared to be a step towards building a nuclear arsenal.

Iranian authorities immediately described Olmert's comments as empty “bravado,” according to the state-run news agency Isna.

The head of its parliamentary foreign affairs commission, Alladin Borojerdy, said: “If the United States and Israel commit such a mistake, they know better than anybody what the consequences will be for themselves.”

He added that the head of the UN nuclear watchdog “Mohammed ElBaraedi has stated that Iran's nuclear science cannot be destroyed by missile strikes ... because the science is national.”

Many of Iran's nuclear facilities are believed to be deep underground, in reinforced bunkers difficult to destroy with conventional weapons.—AFP