WASHINGTON, Aug 4: A senior US official has assured Pakistan that the civilian nuclear energy deal between the United States and India would not fuel a nuclear arms race in South Asia.
Nicholas Burns, the US undersecretary of state, who led the two-year negotiations, said the deal would put India’s planned nuclear reprocessing facility under international safeguards in perpetuity.
In a special briefing for Dawn and some Indian newspapers, Mr Burns emphasised that any nuclear fuel that India would receive under the deal would be safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). India had agreed to open 14 of its 22 existing civilian nuclear reactors to regular IAEA inspections.
The official said in an earlier briefing that the Indo-US agreement would have no impact whatsoever on India’s nuclear weapons programme. “There is no reason why this agreement should become a divisive issue between the US and Pakistan. It speaks only to the future peaceful development of India’s civil nuclear power sector.”
On Friday, the Arms Control Association (ACA), a Washington-based non-proliferation group, dubbed the finalised operative agreement of the deal as: “A bad deal gets worse”.
“The administration appears to have once again agreed to virtually all of India’s demands at the cost of US national security and non-proliferation interests,” the group said.
The report said the administration had compromised on the right of the US to terminate nuclear cooperation and call for return of materials and equipment subject to the agreement if India conducted a N-test; the reprocessing of spent fuel produced from US-origin nuclear fuel; and assurances of the supply of nuclear fuel to India in the event that India suffered a disruption in supply.
The Bush administration was planning to convene a special session of the Nuclear Suppliers Group this fall to discuss and approve the deal, Mr Burns said.
