Iran warned America and Israel yesterday that it was ready to launch preemptive strikes to stop them attacking its nuclear facilities.

The Iranian defense minister, Ali Shamkhani, said the presence of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan was not a threat to Tehran. On the contrary, American soldiers were now “hostages” to Iran.

His comments came as America and Britain decided to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran to curb its nuclear program. However, they agreed to delay any move to impose sanctions until after November’s presidential elections in America.

Iran says it has an “indisputable right” to nuclear technology for civilian purposes, but America is convinced this is a cover for producing atomic weapons.

The crisis has intensified since June, when Iran partly reneged on an agreement with European countries to suspend its uranium-enrichment program.

Last week, Tehran made a show of testing its 800-mile range Shahab-3 missiles, saying it had improved their accuracy.

On Monday, it threatened to attack Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona if Israel tried to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities in a repeat of the 1981 bombing of Saddam’s Osiraq nuclear reactor – often held up as the model for pre-emptive action.

In the latest outburst, Mr. Shamkhani told the Al Jazeera satellite TV network: “We will not sit with our arms folded to wait for what others will do to us.

“Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations, which the Americans talk about, are not their monopoly.

“America is not the only one present in the region. We are also present, from Khost to Kandahar in Afghanistan; we are present in the Gulf and we can be present in Iraq.”

The governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency will meet in Vienna next month to discuss a catalogue of Iranian breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Hard-line members of the Bush administration demand that Iran be reported to the United Nations for possible sanctions.

But meeting privately at a barbecue in Washington last weekend, Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Secretary of State Powell decided to avoid an immediate confrontation with Tehran.

Several sources said they opted instead for a step-by-step strategy that would only result in a referral to the U.N. Security Council at the atomic agency’s board meeting in November or even March next year.

After more than a year of inspections to uncover the scale of Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran raised the stakes this summer by resuming the production, assembly, and testing of uranium enrichment centrifuges – key equipment that can make fissile material for nuclear power reactors or nuclear weapons.