WASHINGTON, April 19: The US said on Wednesday that India made a commitment to maintain its unilateral ban on atomic testing when it signed an agreement for nuclear cooperation with Washington.
“We are confident that the commitment will be upheld,” a State Department official told Dawn.
Giving the background of the Indo-US understanding on this issue, the official said: “India made a commitment to maintain its unilateral ban on testing in the July 18, 2005 joint statement during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington.”
The joint statement laid the foundation for the nuclear agreement President Bush later ratified during his visit to New Delhi on March 4.
But on Monday an Indian foreign office spokesman told reporters in New Delhi that India would not cede the right to conduct nuclear tests to secure an agreement with the US.
“India has already conveyed to the US that such a provision has no place in the proposed bilateral agreement,” spokesman Navtej Sarna said.
The deal finalised last month in New Delhi aims to lift a US embargo on the transfer of nuclear fuel and technology to India for civilian purposes. Later, media reports claimed that the latest draft version of the agreement provided by Washington includes a clause that would cancel the deal if India conducted further nuclear tests.
But in a statement issued in New Delhi, the Indian foreign ministry said that no clause in the agreement it signed with the US forbids it from conducting nuclear tests.
The ministry said that India was bound only by what is contained in the July 18 joint statement that is, continuing its commitment to a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.
While US officials agree with the Indian position on this issue, they interpret the joint statement as well as the nuclear agreement differently.
The US position on this issue is linked to a law which forbids nuclear cooperation with any country that conducts a nuclear weapon test. The US used this law to impose sweeping sanctions on both India and Pakistan after the 1998 tests.
After signing the agreement for nuclear cooperation with India, the Bush administration sent a bill to US Congress asking it to amend the law to remove the sanctions imposed on India. Congress is currently debating the bill.
The Bush administration, however, says the amendment only applies to using nuclear technology for producing energy and not for nuclear weapon tests.
Diplomatic observers in Washington say that a weapon test would automatically invoke US sanctions against India and will lead to the cancellation of the nuclear deal.
Meanwhile, in a related development media reports in the US are claiming that American intelligence agencies failed to warn the administration of nuclear tests conducted by India in 1974 and 1998 despite tracking the South Asian country’s civilian and nuclear energy programmes from as early as 1958.
Recent declassified US government documents, now placed at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University, show that the agencies were aware of India’s preparations for the tests but they did not believe it would actually go ahead with them.
The latest postings include as many as 40 documents ranging from unclassified to top secret code words produced by agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, Pentagon, State Department and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, covering a time span between 1958 and 1998.
As early as 1958 the CIA was exploring the possibility that India might choose to develop nuclear weapons, with the reports focussing on a range of nuclear related matters such as policy, reactor construction and operations, foreign assistance, the tests and the domestic and international impact of the tests.
Over the last five decades the US has gathered intelligence on Indian nuclear activities, civilian and military, through all the means at its disposal — human intelligence, open source collection, communications intelligence, and overhead reconnaissance.
Those activities... allowed US intelligence analysts to provide decision-makers with far more detailed assessments of Indian nuclear activities than would be available from public sources.
