"There is no hope ... that India will sign the NPT , but India is prepared to join the international community to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," said Brajesh Mishra, India's national security advisor.

Mishra also said that India needed more nuclear power plants to produce extra electricity in the coming years, possibly as much as 200,000 megawatts in the long-term.

Speaking with Mishra at the close of a security conference here, Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said that his country would do its utmost to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.

"We will fulfil the non-proliferation requirements there is no question about that," he said. "It is not something that is in our interest that proliferation takes place."

Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in May 1998 in a tit-for-tat response to similar detonations by India.

Pakistan has been embroiled in a scandal involving a top scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of the nuclear bomb there.

He confessed to passing nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea and publicly begged the nation's forgiveness. Khan has since been pardoned.