WASHINGTON, March 28: The United States knows Pakistan's government was not involved in nuclear proliferation, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf said in a taped television interview broadcast on Sunday.

"They know that nuclear proliferation has not been done by the government," Musharraf told ABC's "This Week" news show, in the interview taped on Friday in Islamabad. "They know that there are some individuals who have done it."

President Musharraf has been pulled in a controversy over top Pakistani scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan's involvement in leaking nuclear secrets. Dr Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, last month publicly confessed that he had shared nuclear secrets with Iran, Libya and North Korea. Gen Musharraf later pardoned Khan.

Asked whether high-level Pakistani military officials were involved, he said: "You can't say that I know that every person connected with the Pakistani military over some sustained period of time had no knowledge or participation whatsoever. That's silly. I couldn't do that."

The impact of Dr Khan's leaks is unclear, he said. "People are, I think, over-assessing the physical damage of the proliferation that he has done," Musharraf said. "We have to be clear now, what was the impact?"

"If you are given a drawing or parts of centrifuges or even a whole centrifuge, that doesn't mean that the country is capable of producing a nuclear device. This is not easy. It's a highly technical issue."

Detonating a nuclear bomb is complicated, he added. "You can't explode it unless you have a proper expertise over trigger mechanisms," he said. President Musharraf said it was impossible for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network to make a briefcase bomb.

"Never. Absolutely impossible," he said. "Now, when you talk of a briefcase bomb, you're talking of a trigger mechanism. It's not that you can sit in mountains and make these things right there." Later, he added: "If I hand over a missile or a bomb to any extremist, believe me, he can do nothing about it. He cannot explode it."-AFP