NEW DELHI, Jan 10: India will walk away from a civilian nuclear deal with the United States if New Delhi's concerns are not allayed, its envoy said on Wednesday. Under the deal, the US president would be required to end the export of nuclear materials if India tests another nuclear device. It tested one in 1998.

It also does not guarantee uninterrupted fuel supplies for reactors and prevents India from reprocessing spent fuel.

It was critical the deal allowed India to reprocess spent US nuclear fuel and did not stop it conducting nuclear tests, Shyam Saran, India's special envoy to the negotiations, said.

“This process will have to continue and there are certain very important issues which would have to be addressed and these are difficult issues,” Saran said in a speech to diplomats and strategic affairs experts.

“Can we walk away from this deal if it does not correspond to our national interest? Obviously we have to walk away from this and we will walk away from it.”

President George W. Bush last month signed into law a bill approved by Congress allowing the deal to go through, a major step towards letting India buy US nuclear reactors and fuel for the first time in 30 years.

But Congress attached several conditions to the law which have not gone down well with New Delhi, and the two countries have returned to negotiations.

Saran said these conditions were not acceptable to India and this had been conveyed to the US.

“Reprocessing of spent fuel will be very important, very critical. Without that it may be very difficult for us to take this forward,” he said. “While we are prepared to maintain a unilateral moratorium on fresh testing, we are not prepared to convert a policy commitment into a legal commitment,” he said, referring to India's voluntary decision not to conduct nuclear tests.

Indian communists, who shore up the coalition government, and the opposition Hindu nationalists say the deal's provisions are an attempt by the US to stifle India's nuclear programme.

The deal has also been unpopular with the US non-proliferation lobby which says Washington is undermining efforts to curb the spread of nuclear arms. India has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Saran said he remained confident the two countries could still manage to conclude a deal.

“We have dealt with very difficult issues in the past and we have dealt with them very successfully. The mindset on both sides is of problem-solving rather than taking very rigid positions.”

The deal must be approved by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, the International Atomic Energy Agency and again by the US Congress before nuclear trade can start.—Reuters