WASHINGTON, Aug 4: The Bush administration’s move to share civilian nuclear technology with India could affect American interests in the war on terror in Pakistan and can also hamper its bid to tackle the nuclear crisis in North Korea, says a former member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Within days of 9/11, President Pervez Musharraf pledged Pakistan’s support in the war on terror - but how is he supposed to react now that the US appears to be shifting support to India,” asks Patrick M. Holt, former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In an article published in the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday, Mr Holt warns that the Indo-US nuclear deal could have a debilitating effect on America’s non-proliferation policy. For the past two weeks, US newspapers are almost daily publishing articles and comments by former US officials, scholars and think-tank experts warning President Bush of the consequences of his nuclear deal with India.

On Wednesday, former Reagan-era official Lawrence J Korb and a think-tank expert Peter Ogden wrote a similar article in the Washington Post, cautioning the Bush administration that if the Indo-US deal is finalized, Washington will not be able to prevent China from offering the same nuclear cooperation to Pakistan that the US is offering to India.

“It is only a matter of days before Pakistan … demands to receive the same special treatment that India has,” the authors argue. They recall that both India and Pakistan have been denied “certain types of nuclear technology” because they have nuclear weapons and have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “While we were willing to void the most potent nuclear weapons control treaty of the past three decades, India was not even compelled to stop producing fissile material for further weapons,” they note.

“The administration forgot to consider whether putting no limits on India’s fissile material production might not prompt Pakistan to continue such production itself. Such a development would certainly increase the risk of nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists.”

In Thursday’s article, Mr Holt comments on “the US predicament” over convincing other countries not to go nuclear while it maintains its own nuclear agenda. “What Washington is probably overlooking is that the nature of scientific knowledge is such that it cannot be protected or controlled, and given the spread of nuclear weapons, America’s non-proliferation policy must be called a failure,” he argues.