The U.S. government has shut down a public web site that included sensitive details about constructing nuclear and chemical weapons, newspapers reported Friday.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence shut down the web site Thursday following complaint from UN weapons inspectors that the site contained documents which were collected in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion but predated the 1991 Persian War, The Washington Post reported.

The document did not indicate that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when U.S. President George W. Bush ordered American troops to take over the country and depose Saddam Hussein, intelligence officials were quoted as saying.

In a front-page report, The New York Times said the U.S. government set up the web site in March this year, to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site posted some documents that weapons experts said were a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts said, constituted a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contained charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who had viewed them said go beyond what was available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums.

The government shut down the web site Thursday night after the Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials, the newspaper said.

Access to the site had been suspended "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing," a spokesman for John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, told the Times.

Source: Xinhua