BEIJING, March 5 (Xinhuanet) -- Air strikes on Iran to destroy nuclear facilities could speed up the Tehran regime's drive to obtain atomic bomb and bolstering hostility towards the West, a British leading weapons scientist warned on Monday.

    Frank Barnaby, who formerly worked at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, said Iran could respond to an attack by launching a "crash programme" to build a crude nuclear device within months.

    In a report for the Oxford Research Group think-tank, he said that with "inadequate intelligence" about the full scale of Iran's nuclear facilities, air strikes were unlikely to succeed in destroying the programme. It would then only be a matter of time before it could be reconstituted, while at the same time political attitudes in the country would be hardening.

    "In the aftermath of a military strike, if Iran devoted maximum effort and resources to building one nuclear bomb, it could achieve this in a relatively short amount of time."

    Such a weapon would then be wielded in "an environment of incalculably greater hostility," said Barnaby, one of the few remaining people in the world to have witnessed an above ground nuclear test in the Australian desert in 1953.

    He urged greater diplomatic efforts to end a standoff with Tehran.

    The report comes amid intense speculation that the United States or Israel could be preparing a pre-emptive strike in the face of Tehran's continuing refusal to abandon uranium enrichment work -- a key step in building a nuclear bomb.

    (Agencies)