The failure of US forces to find any of the banned weapons since the regime's ouster seven weeks ago has raised growing questions about the US weapons of mass destruction charges that served as the primary pretext for the war.

"I can assure you that this war was not waged under any false pretext," Rumsfeld said in an radio interview with Infinity Broadcasting.

"We believed then and we believe now that the Iraqis have, had chemical weapons, biological weapons and that they had a program to develop nuclear weapons but did not have nuclear weapons," he said.

"That is what the United Kingdom's intelligence suggested as well."

Rumsfeld said the reason no weapons have been found "is not because they are not there -- we believe they are there."

He noted the discovery of two tractor-trailers rigs in Iraq which US intelligence concluded this week were probably designed and equipped to manufacture biological agents.

"People are saying why haven't we found anything, and I would respond by saying, A, it's going to take some time, and, B, we have found things," he said.

Earlier this week at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Rumsfeld said another possibility was that Iraq may have destroyed its chemical and biological weapons before the war.

Asked about the comment, the secretary said there were a number of theories about the weapons -- that Iraq designed its program for "just in time delivery" so as not to maintain a large inventory of weapons, that they may have been buried, that some might have been moved to neighboring countries.

"My personal view is not any of those because that is just intelligence chatter," he said. "My personal view is that we are going to find them."

WAR.WIRE