The US government accidentally made public a secret report detailing its nuclear sites, programs and even exact locations of nuclear stockpiles, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

"The federal government mistakenly made public (the) 266-page report," the Times reported, noting that the blunder was revealed on Monday in an online newsletter about 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made public," the Times said, adding that by late on Tuesday "after inquiries from The New York Times, the document was withdrawn from a Government Printing Office Web site".

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday she had called for an investigation into the incident.

"The disclosure of information related to nuclear facilities suggests that the current system does not provide adequate review and safeguards," she said in a statement.

"Accordingly, I have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate immediately what led to the disclosure of this information and to make recommendations to prevent a similar disclosure in the future."

Several analysts said the security breach was not devastating "given that the general outlines of the most sensitive information were already known publicly," the report said.

"These screw-ups happen," the Times quoted John Deutch, a former director of central intelligence now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as saying. "It's going further than I would have gone but doesn't look like a serious breach."

The information was described as "confidential but not classified," the Times added.

David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security here, told the paper however that making the locations of nuclear material available "can provide thieves or terrorists inside information that can help them seize the material, which is why that kind of data is not given out".