Pentagon officers "have told the administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear programme," Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in the magazine's latest edition.

The military officers are concerned about contingency plans to launch air strikes against Iran because of the absence of actionable intelligence or concrete evidence of bomb making, the magazine said, citing unnamed active duty and retired officers and officials.

The article also alleges that the White House had advocated the possible use of a nuclear device to attack Iran's uranium enrichment plant in Natanz but that the military leadership ultimately succeeded in having the option dropped in late April.

The military's experience in Iraq, in which US intelligence on weapons of mass destruction proved "deeply flawed," has made senior officers wary in the case of a possible air campaign against Iran, the New Yorker said.

"The target array in Iran is huge, but it's amorphous.... We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq," one high-ranking general told the magazine.