CANBERRA, July 26: Australia might lift its ban on selling uranium to India if New Delhi forms the nuclear partnership it is negotiating with the United States, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Thursday.

Australia, which holds 40 per cent of the world's known uranium reserves, currently won't sell uranium to India because New Delhi is developing nuclear weapons and refuses to join an international non-proliferation treaty.

But Downer said India's dramatic economic expansion and the threat of global warming has forced the government to reconsider that ban.

Australia will take its cue from the civilian nuclear partnership deal that Washington and New Delhi have been negotiating for the past two years, Downer said.

Under the deal, the US would ship nuclear fuel and technology to India in return for India opening its civilian nuclear reactors to international inspectors. India's military reactors would remain off-limits. Downer said those negotiations were “heading in the right direction.”

If a deal is reached, “it is a possibility that we would begin negotiations with India over supplying uranium for those power stations which were subject to United Nations inspections and to the regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Downer said.

Senior government ministers gave conditional support Thursday to making India Australia's only uranium customer that is not a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane argued that if Australia did not sell uranium to India, someone else would.

“If it's not from Australia under the strictest guidelines and safeguards, they will simply source it from other countries with much less restriction,” Macfarlane told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

The Australian Democrats, a minor opposition party, said in a statement that selling uranium to India “will undermine the most fundamental international treaty on weapons proliferation and could lead to further escalation of tensions in South Asia.”Security analyst Sandy Gordon said Australian uranium, while quarantined for peaceful purposes, would enable India to divert uranium from other sources to weapons.

“India is in some form of nuclear competition with China and Pakistan ... and it would have an effect on that,” Gordon told ABC.

Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq said his country, which came close to nuclear war with India in 2002, expected a similar offer of Australian uranium.

“As a Pakistani, I can tell you the entire nation will be very upset” if Pakistan is excluded, Ijaz told ABC.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty calls on nations to pledge not to pursue nuclear weapons in exchange for a commitment by five nuclear powers — the US, Russia, Britain, France and China — to move toward nuclear disarmament.

India and Pakistan, known nuclear weapons states, remain outside the treaty, as does Israel, which is considered to have such arms but has not acknowledged it.—AP