Thursday, April 6 2006 10:15 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States would push for a South Asian moratorium on nuclear weapons production to ease tensions between India and Pakistan.

"We would like to see, obviously, in the regional sense in the relationship between India and Pakistan and others, a look at regional moratorium on fissile material production," Rice told a Congressional hearing on a landmark US-India civilian nuclear deal yesterday.

"We've made it very clear that we would encourage that; that we would encourage India and Pakistan to look at their nuclear relationship and the way that in some of the earlier days people were concerned about safety and security between the US and Soviet arsenals," she said.

Rice was replying to Democratic Senator John Kerry on whether the United States could offer 'real leadership' is trying to bring together the nuclear-armed neighbours, neither of whom are signatories to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Kerry, the failed Democratic candidate in the last presidential election, said that it was hard to understand why India and Pakistan would need to continue to build nuclear weapons at levels beyond an adequate deterrent between each other and China, an NPT signatory.

Kerry said he had raised this with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf "There seemed to be a genuine spark of interest in the notion of trying to arrive at some agreement regionally on the numbers of nuclear weapons." Rice said the United States was unable to get an undertaking from the South Asian nations on nuclear controls.

"Well, what we couldn't achieve and I think it was unlikely was a constraint unilaterally by any one state," Rice said.

"But the idea that has been pursued in some second-track arrangements, some second-track of discussions between the parties about not just absolute levels but also safety and security and confidence-building measures, I think is something we're very interested in and we'd like to pursue," she said.

US relations with India and Pakistan were improving rapidly "that might make it worthwhile," she added.

"I can't say that it's going to have an immediate payoff. These things are hard," she added.