"It looks like it did not answer the main question that the world is asking and that is, 'When will you get rid of your nuclear program?'," Bush said in his first public comment on the letter.

Bush made the remarks in an interview with Florida newspapers that was posted on the St. Petersburg Times Web site.

"Britain, France, Germany - coupled with the United States and Russia and China have all agreed that the Iranians should not have a weapon or the capacity to make a weapon," Bush said.

"There is a universal agreement toward that goal and the letter didn't address that question," he said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to U.S. President George W. Bush on finding new solutions to their differences, Iranian government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham said on Monday.

As there is no relations between Washington and Tehran, the 18-page letter was delivered to U.S. President George W. Bush by the Swiss embassy to Iran, the first publicly announced communication from an Iranian president to a U.S. president since the break between the two countries in 1979 after Iran's Islamic revolution.