WASHINGTON, April 26: The Indo-US deal will initiate a nuclear arms race in South and Central Asian regions with China helping Pakistan and Russia offering more help to Iran’s atomic programme, warned some of the experts who appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

More than half of the eight experts who appeared before the committee described the agreement as harmful which will seriously undermine international efforts to contain weapons of mass destruction.

“The damage will be done to the non-proliferation norm by legitimatizing India’s condition, by exempting it from a policy that has held for decades,” said Robert L. Gallucci, dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Washington’s Georgetown University.

“There is no reason why we should attach any positive value to India’s willingness to submit a few additional nuclear facilities of its choosing to international safeguards, so long as other fissile material producing facilities are free from safeguards.”

Robert J. Einhorn, senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, said that in seeking to make India an exception to longstanding non-proliferation rules, “the Bush administration has given India virtually all that it wanted and has run major risks with the future of the non-proliferation regime.

“Indeed, that already seems to be happening. Russia, which a year ago said it couldn’t provide nuclear fuel to India’s Tarapur reactors … recently sent a large fuel shipment to those reactors … it is also not by coincidence that, not long after the US-India deal, China and Pakistan began discussing additional reactor sales.”

Dr Gary Milhollin, director, Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and professor emeritus University of Wisconsin Law School, also warned that if the deal was approved, “China will drop controls on its friend Pakistan, and Russia will drop controls on its friend Iran. There will be no way to convince either China or Russia not to do that.”

If it approved the deal, “Congress would be buying a pig in a poke. It would be giving the administration carte blanche authority to make an agreement that, because of Congress’ reduced power of review, there would be little opportunity to change.”

Ashton B. Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defence Project at Harvard University, called the deal “uneven and imbalanced”.