Washington ? Iran halted its secret effort to develop a nuclear weapon four years ago and doesn’t appear to have restarted the project, a comprehensive new U.S. intelligence report said Monday.

Iran’s decision to stop the program in mid-2003 indicates that it’s “less determined” to acquire nuclear weapons and “more vulnerable” to international pressure than U.S. intelligence agencies had previously believed, the U.S. intelligence community said.

The long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate, however, warned that the Islamic regime could resume its nuclear effort and “has the scientific, technical and industrial capabilities to eventually produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.”

Nevertheless, the NIE is a stunning reversal of the main conclusion of a 2005 estimate – that Iran’s theocratic rulers were “determined” to develop nuclear weapons despite threats of sanctions and international isolation.

The declassified key judgments also undermine both President Bush’s Oct. 17 warning that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons could “ignite World War III” and his administration’s drive for tougher international sanctions against Iran.

In addition, they deal another blow to the administration’s credibility and influence, already battered by its use of bogus and exaggerated intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“I think there is going to be a tendency for a lot of people to say: ‘Whoop! The problem’s less bad than we thought,'” White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley conceded Monday.

Hadley said Bush was briefed on the NIE’s conclusions last Wednesday. But he appeared to acknowledge that U.S. intelligence agencies already had concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program when Bush told a news conference that Tehran’s quest for a nuclear arsenal could trigger a third world war.

“He (Bush) would have made that, I believe, that comment after” the new intelligence was known, Hadley told reporters.

An NIE represents the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and is written by the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s highest analytical body.

It said that because of unidentified “intelligence gaps,” U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Energy assessed with “moderate confidence” that Iran “had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007.”

“We do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons,” the key judgments continued. “We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon” even though “we cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad – or will acquire in the future – a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon.”

The NIE said Iran appears to be having problems with its uranium enrichment program and probably won’t be capable of producing highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon before 2010.

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research dissented from that view and estimated that Iran won’t be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a weapon before 2013.