We study the behaviour of charge oscillations in superconducting Cooper pair boxes weakly interacting with an environment. We found that, due to the noise and dissipation induced by the environment, the stability properties of these nanodevices differ according to whether the charge oscillations are interpreted as an effect of macroscopic quantum coherence, or semiclassically in terms of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. More specifically, occupation number states, used in the quantum interpretation of the oscillations, are found to be much more unstable than coherent ones, typical of the semiclassical explanation.