ISLAMABAD: Pakistan sought on Wednesday to play down Iranian warning that the United States was planning to sabotage its nuclear facilities by emphasising that its atomic programme was safe and secure.

“Pakistan is a nuclear-weapon state. This is an established fact. We do not comment on our strategic programme,” was the brief Foreign Office response to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s warning that the US planned to sabotage Pakistan’s nuclear programme in order to dominate the country and undermine its sovereignty.

Beyond this brief statement no official comment was available. However, background discussions with officials indicated that the warning was taken as an attempt by Tehran to draw Islamabad into its dispute with Washington over its own nuclear programme. “It is unhelpful to pit one against the other,” said an official, who didn’t want to be identified.

Pak-Iran relations have a long history of mistrust. Some officials believe that the warning was a political move by President Ahmadinejad to dissipate the pressure on his own nuclear programme after IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, reported to have received information about existence of possible military dimensions in Iran’s nuclear programme.

That Pakistani leaders gave little credence to the Iranian warning was noticeable from the fact that they did not even think of asking Iran for sharing of information, which Mr Ahmadinejad had described as “precise”. “No, we are not asking them for details,” an official said.

The reaction to the warning contrasted with the fears that were noticeable until a few days ago, particularly in the aftermath of the attack on PNS Mehran, with a lot of whispering about certain countries trying to invoke Chapter 7 of the UN because of possible threats to security of the country’s nuclear weapons. Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen had said last month that security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons was a matter of concern.