"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."

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

The British government also was on the defensive Thursday after the BBC reported it had embellished a paper released in September on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction with the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes.

The BBC said the British intelligence agencies opposed including the assertion in the dossier because the source for it was unreliable.

And in an interview published Wednesday by Vanity Fair, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying that "for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

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

Asked Thursday 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 a 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."

After the 1991 Gulf War, UN inspectors uncovered Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear programs. Baghdad also was known to have used chemical weapons in the 1980s against its ethnic Kurdish minority and against Iran.

Iraq insisted during the most recent confrontation, however, that it had destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction.

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 in Iraq which US intelligence concluded this week were probably designed and equipped to make 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.

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