However, M. G. K. Menon, the new director of TIFR, pushed back against Cockcroft's statement, arguing that the motivation behind setting up the Indian plutonium reprocessing plant "has sometimes been misunderstood". He said that because the decision to build the plant was taken before the 1962 Indo-China war, it could not have been built for security reasons and was purely for reprocessing fuel rods. However, Menon conceded that mistrust between the two nations had been public since 1950. India also had knowledge of the Chinese nuclear weapons program before the 1962 war.