Washington: The United States has admitted it faces a "conundrum" in convincing India and Pakistan to go slow on their nuclear ambitions, but said it was working hard to get them to exercise restraint.

"Under the rules of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), India and Pakistan, which are not signatories, cannot be accepted as nuclear weapon states. But they do have nuclear weapons and we see no realistic prospect that they will be getting rid of them any day soon," US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca said on March 21.

Testifying before the international relations committee's subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Rocca said the Bush administration is working on three key areas to solve the problem.

"We are working hard with both nations to get them to exercise restraint. We are asking them not to conduct nuclear tests, to minimise missile tests, to announce their missile tests in order to keep the tensions down, to announce them in advance, to bring an early end to the production of fissile material, which would be in line with their stated policies of having these weapons as a minimum credible deterrent.

"We are also asking them not to build sea-launch or intercontinental ballistic missiles, not to deploy nuclear-capable warheads or ballistic missiles, and to keep missiles and warheads at separate locations," she said.

The US, she added, was working closely with both countries on stopping proliferation. The third area is one of defusing tensions between them. "The high levels of tension and the lack of dialogue and the cold war that exists increases the risk that the nuclear threshold might be crossed through misperception or inadvertence."

PTI