WASHINGTON, Sept 8: The India-US nuclear deal was signed too quickly and secretively, and there are major faults in the agreement, says a top US expert. George Perkovich, a nuclear and South Asia expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has released a report that claims the US-India civilian nuclear cooperation would hurt global non-proliferation regime and encourage other nations to go nuclear as well.

Mr Perkovich says that the deal, signed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the White House on July 18, also exposed key faults in America’s policies towards India and in Indian nuclear policy.

In his article, Faulty Promises: The US-India Nuclear Deal, carried in CEIP’s Policy Outlook web journal, Mr Perkovich observes that the deal Mr Bush and Mr Singh signed two months ago tantamount to changing rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“The (Bush) administration’s desire to mobilize India to balance Chinese military power in Asia distorts the strategy, as does the Indian government’s obsession with nuclear energy,” the article contends, claiming that Washington should have based its partnership with New Delhi “on the intrinsic value of augmenting the political-economic development of democratic India’s one billion people”.

“Unfortunately, the deal was developed so secretively and quickly that it contains major faults of its own,” said Mr Perkovich, who authored India’s Nuclear Bomb, the prize-winning history of the Indian nuclear programme.

The author also believes that India’s capacity and willingness to cooperate with the US in balancing Chinese power are too uncertain to form the foundation of a strategic partnership.

One major test of India’s intentions and US seriousness will be when the Indian nuclear establishment proposes to exclude India’s prototype fast breeder reactor and all other research and development facilities from safeguards, Mr Perkovich says.

But Mr Perkovich also decries the rigidity of American non-proliferation fundamentalists, warning that being inflexible about existing rules will undermine the non-proliferation regime’s legitimacy.

He says that the Americans need to recognize that the five acknowledged nuclear weapon states already have changed the rules of the non-proliferation regime.

“Defending the sanctity of NPT-related rules to deny nuclear technology to a developing country ... while doing little to defend the sanctity of disarmament commitments is the height of hypocrisy,” he says.

He also notes that developing countries have scarcely voiced any concerns about the Bush-Singh agreement.

Welcoming the decision to share nuclear technology with ‘a poor country’ like India, Mr Perkovich says: “The fact that the US seeks to allow ‘advanced’ technology to go to a poor country is so unusual and welcome that it outweighs the detail that India possesses nuclear weapons.”

At the same time, he admonishes the Bush administration for not getting more from India in return.