This request was an attempt to establish the basis for the dossier's claim, repeated in Parliament by Tony Blair, that Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon within one and two years with suitable fissile material from abroad. The request asked whether this claim (para 23) or the claim in an earlier draft of the dossier that this would take "at least two years" were based on formal assessments. The JIC assessments quoted in the Butler Review had only stated that this time period for this possible scenario would be shorter than five years.

In a letter dated 26 April 2007, the Cabinet Office stated:

"...we do not hold the information."

This means that the Cabinet Office is unable to cite any formal assessment as a basis for either of the claims.

In its initial reply in 2006 the Cabinet Office had stated:

"We have made reasonable searches but have not found the information you requested."

However, to avoid having to admit directly that the claims were not based on a formal assessment, the Cabinet Office claimed that "to answer definitively" whether it held the information would exceed the statutory cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. This limit (£600) is equivalent to three-and-a-half days' work.

It was pointed out to the Cabinet Office that it was effectively claiming that it might have produced a formal assessment of another state's ability to produce a nuclear weapon but subsequently mislaid both the assessment and any record of its existence. In spite of this, following a review it continued to maintain the same line, refusing even to state that it had searched all of the (internal) sources that might reasonably be expected to hold the information.

The Cabinet office did state in the review that it did not hold any comments on the accuracy and/or public relations impact of the position set out in the 10 September draft, that it would take at least two years to make a nuclear weapon. This implies that the information referred to and withheld in Cabinet Office Freedom of Information request 1 does not include such material.