French President Jacques Chirac started quite the uproar with his apparent faux pas made public on Thursday in which he downplayed the Iranian nuclear threat. Chirac says he thought he was speaking off the record when, during an interview with The New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Le Nouvel Observateur, he said an Iranian nuclear weapon would not be much of a threat because "Tehran would be razed to the ground" if it ever tried to deploy such a device. Chirac's comments (which were quickly retracted) directly undermine the West's stance on Iran — and they do not reflect the official French position, which was summed up Thursday in a statement from the Elysee Palace that read "France, with the international community, cannot accept the prospect of Iran with a nuclear weapon.