Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Monday that the issue of Tehran's controversial nuclear programme was "closed" and that his country was prepared for any eventuality.
"The nuclear issue is now closed. We do not feel threatened at all and we are prepared for any eventuality or conditions," he told reporters through an interpreter during an annual summit of Gulf Cooperation Council leaders in the Qatari capital Doha.
Ahmadinejad was the first Iranian president to attend the gathering of the neighbouring bloc of wealthy Gulf Arab oil producers, who are wary of Tehran's atomic ambitions.
During the summit, Ahmadinejad offered to sign a security pact with the GCC which groups Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Western nations suspect Iran is using its programme of uranium enrichment to covertly develop an atomic bomb.
However the US intelligence community said on Monday that Iran appears "less determined to develop nuclear weapons" than the US government has been claiming for the past two years.
At the same time, the Islamic republic is thought to be "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," according to declassified key findings of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the formal consensus of all 16 US spy agencies.
The NIE warned that Iran was still pursuing sensitive activities that can be a key step towards nuclear weapons and was expected to have the technical ability to develop a nuclear weapon sometime between 2010 and 2015.
It cited "high confidence" that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme in late 2003 and "moderate confidence" that it had not restarted as of mid-2007.
