Former inspector David Albright said he has few, if any encouraging signs from Washington since he published a report Monday saying that Abdul Qadeer Khan could have sold them blueprints for an advanced nuclear warhead.

"I'm not very optimistic," Albright told AFP on Thursday when asked whether he could pressure the US government into getting Pakistan to allow Khan to be questioned by outside experts.

"I haven't talked to US government people about this ... My main motivation was just to let people know about this and that a public discussion could put pressure on the US government," he said in the telephone interview.

"But I don't know if it has (raised pressure). So far they're reacting as if they don't want to hear the information," said Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).

In his report on the ISIS website, Albright wrote that the United States and the UN atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), must be allowed to question Khan to learn if he sold the plans to Pyongyang or Tehran.

Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, on Tuesday strongly denied the suspicions cast by Albright.

Albright said he fears there is a danger that Khan might be released from house arrest without having to answer questions about the sensitive blueprints which show how to build a warhead compact enough to fit on a ballistic missile.

They were found on the computers of Swiss businessmen linked to Khan's network.

Khan was pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf in 2004 after making a televised statement admitting to passing nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, but has not been allowed out in public.

However, after Musharraf's allies lost general elections in February, Khan retracted the confession and said that it was forced, while asserting he merely gave Tehran and Tripoli advice on where to get atomic know-how.

The new Pakistani government has recently relaxed restrictions on Khan, including allowing him to meet friends at a scientific institute and take phone calls, although he remains effectively confined to his house.

Albright said he could not rule out a change in the US position after seeing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice giving a speech Wednesday "at least recognizing that they didn't have all the answers on the Khan network."

But he said he believed "there's other priorities" for the US government which wants, among other things, to bolster cooperation with Pakistan in fighting extremist groups near the border with Afghanistan.

"Unfortunately, that's the kind of choice that got them into trouble in the first place with Khan -- that he becomes less important than something else and then in this case he may become a free man," Albright said.

"And that sends a pretty terrible signal if you're trying to deter people from being little Khans or duplicate what Khan did," he said.

"The signal that the US unfortunately helps send is that there isn't a lot of punishment if you do these things," he concluded.

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