State Department spokesman James Rubin, asked if Washington had examined the document released by India's National Security Advisory Board and found it encouraging, particularly since it called for civilian control of nuclear weapons, claimed the US found it far from encouraging. "We have received the document. We are studying it. In general, we don't find it an encouraging document," he said. Rubin said, "We find it a document that describes the Indian desire to develop a nuclear arsenal and that is something that we think is not in the security interests of India, the subcontinent, or the United States or the world." When reporters asked if the US does not buy the premise of the doctrine that India has to counter Chinese nuclear threats and hence the need for a credible minimumnuclear deterrent, Rubin said, "There's nothing new about China having nuclear weapons."

"They've had them for a long, long time; since about the time that I was born. And that did not generate the need for India to develop and test nuclear weapons," he said. According to Rubin, "They (India) obviously made the decision....based on other factors, in our opinion, and that (China threat) wasn't the key factor."

In an apparent reference to Defence Minister George Fernandes' statement after last year's nuclear tests, naming nuclear China as "potential enemy No 1," Rubin said: "At the time when India detonated its nuclear device, some Indian officials made that claim. And I think you are quite familiar with what we thought of that claim." When reporters pressed him to rekindle their memory, Rubin shot back, "We didn't agree with it. We still don't agree with it. Nothing has changed in our view."

Rubin said the US would continue to urge India "to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban (Treaty, CTBT), tonot weaponise missiles so that they can carry nuclear weapons." He said Washington would also urge India "to stop the production of fissile material and to develop an export control system, the combination of which is certainly not consistent with the broad outlines of this doctrine as we know it."