New York: Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified programme to help Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf secure his country's nuclear weapons, a media report said today quoting unidentified current and former senior US administration officials.

But with the future of the Pakistani leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying in Washington about whether the US has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Islamabad's reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort, the New York Times reported.

The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training of Pakistani personnel in the US and the construction of a nuclear security training centre in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this year.

"Everything has taken far longer than it should," a former official involved in the programme told the paper. "And you are never sure what you really accomplished."

A raft of equipment - from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment - was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material, its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of nuclear proliferation in the atomic age, the Times asserted.

Source : PTI