NEW DELHI, July 20: Former Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee led a chorus of protest on Wednesday against the India-US agreement envisaging opening up of New Delhi’s civilian nuclear facilities for foreign inspection.

“The understanding arrived at between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Bush regarding nuclear technology as reflected in the Joint India-US statement of July 18, 2005, has already caused concern, even consternation among nuclear scientists and defence analysts.

“The Bhartiya Janata Party shares these concerns and fears,” Mr Vajpayee said in a statement. “The first and the foremost is India’s offer to identify and separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and programmes. This offer has long-term national security implications,” Mr Vajpayee said, echoing remarks earlier made by his former National Security AdvisEr Brajesh Mishra on the issue.

“The military programmes are a small fraction of our nuclear facilities,” Mr Vajpayee argued. “We believe that separating the civilian from the military would be very difficult, if not impossible. The costs involved will also be prohibitive. It will also deny us any flexibility in determining the size of our nuclear deterrent.”

Indian scientists have in particular pointed to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, which has given crucial inputs to India’s military prowess as a nuclear state, as a difficult problem to tackle.

While India believes in minimum credible deterrent, the size of the deterrent must be determined from time to time on the basis of the country’s own threat perception, Mr Vajpayee said. “This is a judgement, which cannot be surrendered to anyone else. By effecting a separation between civilian and military facilities, we have also accepted a crucial provision of a future fissile material cut-off treaty even before such an international treaty has been fully negotiated and put into force by other nuclear weapon states.”