New York, June 3: The US government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential”, that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programmes, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.

The publication of the document was revealed on Monday in an online newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed.

It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document had been made public.

Yesterday evening, after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a government printing office website.

Several nuclear experts argued that any dangers from the disclosure were minimal, given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly.

“These screw-ups happen,” said John M. Deutch, a former director of central intelligence and deputy secretary of defence who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s going further than I would have gone but doesn’t look like a serious breach.”