WASHINGTON, July 20: Pakistan is certain to demand similar concession as India, which is being recognized as a de facto nuclear power under a new deal, the US media said on Tuesday. Commenting on the deal the US and Indian leaders signed on Monday, The New York Times observed: “Pakistan … is considered certain to demand similar concessions and some analysts were concerned that the step would weaken international control on nuclear arms.”

Echoing similar sentiments, The Washington Post said: “There were also concerns about how the agreement would be accepted in Pakistan, India’s regional rival and an ally in the US campaign against Al Qaeda.”

The NYT said the main effect of the accord with India would be less on Iran, North Korea or Pakistan than on the many states that have signed up to the bargain implied by the concept of “atoms for peace.”

Among the countries widely known to be able to produce nuclear weapons, but which have not done so because of their desire to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan, it said.

The fear is that these countries, seeing the deal offered to India, might be tempted to get nuclear arms, especially if the crises over North Korea and Iran spin out of control, the paper said.

“If you open the door for India, a lot of other countries are likely to step through it,” the article quoted Leonard S. Spector of the Monterey Centre for Non-proliferation Studies as saying. “China is already thinking of selling additional reactors to Pakistan.”

The Post said Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India and a deputy national security adviser under Condoleezza Rice, conceived the deal with India along with his close confidant Ashley J. Tellis.

Quoting arms control specialists, Boston Globe warned that by signing the deal “the United States risked sending the wrong message — that it was rewarding a nuclear-weapons power that has refused to join treaties designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.”

The newspaper also noted that the US nuclear cooperation with New Delhi “would require changing laws that were designed to punish India for its refusal to disclose details of its nuclear weapons programme and sign the NPT.”

“Some specialists worry that as a result of the agreement, other countries could decide to relax their own rules and provide civilian nuclear know-how that can potentially be used for hostile purposes to countries of concern such as Iran, Pakistan, and Syria,” the newspaper said.

The NYT noted that the deal changes India’s international status from that of a pariah, since it first tested a nuclear weapon in 1974 and refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “to something close to a nuclear-armed nation.”

The Washington Times quoted Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the two persons credited with conceiving the deal, as saying that the Bush administration will have “diminishing incentives” to fulfil its obligations if India is unable to demonstrate a new willingness to ally itself with American purposes.

Unless Indian security managers make conscious efforts to shape their national policies to promote at least tacit coordination with, if not extensive support for, US goals, the strategic partnership the two sides seek will remain elusive, the expert said.

The Washington Post reported that there had been debate within the Bush administration over whether the deal with India, which built its atomic arsenal in secret, would undercut US efforts to confront Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programmes. But Karl Inderfurth, assistant secretary of state for South Asia from 1997 to 2001, told Boston Globe: “The time is right . . . to have a serious discussion about how to reconcile India’s energy needs with our global non-proliferation concerns and do it in a way that will allow us to work with India in a cooperative way in nuclear power.” Teresita Schaffer, South Asia program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the Los Angeles Times: “This is another public step in the transformation from a rather scratchy relationship between the most powerful industrialized country and the biggest of the developing countries. “The new style is a relationship between two countries that see themselves as having a global role that’s relatively compatible,” she added.