Pakistan on Saturday slammed a United States official for assuming that Islamabad would use its nuclear missiles for hostile intent, calling it “perplexing as well as illogical”.

In a statement, the Foreign Office said: “Pakistan has made it abundantly clear that our strategic program and allied capabilities are solely meant to deter and thwart a clear and visible existential threat from our neighbourhood and should not be perceived as a threat to any other country.”

Senior White House official, Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer, on Thursday said Pakistan is developing long-range ballistic missile capabilities that eventually could allow it to strike targets outside of South Asia, including the United States.

Islamabad’s conduct raised “real questions” about its intentions, he said. “Candidly, it’s hard for us to see Pakistan’s actions as anything other than an emerging threat to the United States,” Finer said in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

His comment came a day after the United States said it was imposing new sanctions related to Pakistan’s long-range ballistic-missile programme, including on the state-owned defence agency that oversees the programme.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the measures slapped on the National Development Complex and three firms were imposed under an executive order that “targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”