Pakistan and the US on Sunday launched a major damage-control exercise after a leading magazine reported that the two countries were negotiating secret understandings that will allow American troops to provide security to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal in the event of a crisis.

US Ambassador Anne Patterson dismissed the report as “completely false” while Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit described the assertions in the article as “utterly misleading and totally baseless”.

The report in latest edition of New Yorker magazine said the US administration was negotiating “highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military” to allow specially trained American units to provide “added security for the Pakistani (nuclear) arsenal in case of a crisis”. The article quoted a consultant at the US Department of Defence as saying that a highly classified military and civil emergency response team was put on alert this summer after receiving a intelligence report that a “Pakistani nuclear component had gone astray”. The team was immediately sent and reached Dubai before it was learnt the report was a false alarm.

In a rare statement, Patterson said: “The US has no intention to seize Pakistani nuclear weapons or material.... The US has confidence in Pakistan’s ability to protect its nuclear programmes and materials, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during her recent visit to Pakistan.”

Foreign Office spokesman Basit said Seymour Hersh, the author of the article, had betrayed “his well-known anti-Pakistan bias by making several false and highly irresponsible claims by quoting anonymous and unverifiable sources”. The article was “nothing more than a concoction to tarnish the image of Pakistan”.

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