"I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. Saddam Hussein and his entire regime learned to live with UN inspections," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told "Fox News Sunday."

"The intelligence shows that they were systematically trying to prevent the inspectors from finding them."

Rumsfeld said Iraqi prisoners would help US forces find the weapons of mass destruction.

"We're going to find what we find as a result of talking to people, I believe, not simply by going to some site and hoping to discover it," he said.

Asked if senior Iraqi officials now in US custody were providing information on weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said lower-ranking officials would likely provide the most interesting leads.

"We're going to have to find people not at the very senior level, who are vulnerable, obviously, if they're in custody, but it will be people down below who had been involved in one way or another."

Secretary of State Colin Powell said so far, US forces have not found any nuclear weapons in Iraq but that "we will find weapons of mass destruction."

"We haven't found any evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq as a result of what we have been able to see thus far," he told NBC's "Meet the Press". "But a program is more than just a weapon."

"We didn't think he had a weapon. But he kept in place the infrastruture, and he never lost the infrastructure or the brain power assembled in a way to use that infrastructure, if he was ever given a chance to do so," Powell said.

"So it is still our judgment that if he was given the opportunity and the international community said 'Fine, you're OK, we are not going to bother you any more,' he would still have pursued that objective he has never lost."

Rumsfeld said he still did not know whether the deposed Iraqi leader was alive, but added: "If I had to guess, I would suspect that he may very well be alive."

"He and his crowd are gone. They're either in a tunnel someplace or in a basement hiding. We'll find them, if he's alive."

Meanwhile, Time magazine reported that the US military may have played down its use of cluster bombs during the war in Iraq.

Amid reports last month of heavy casualties, General Richard Myers, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that only 26 cluster bombs -- weapons which explode to scatter hundreds of smaller bomblets -- had landed in civilian areas, resulting in one casualty.

But Myers's claim is hard to reconcile with accounts from hospitals, residents and civil defense officials in Iraqi cities, Time reported, citing civil defense chief for Karbala, Abdul Kareem Mussan who said his men are harvesting about 1,000 cluster bombs a day in places the United States said were not targets.

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