No winner, loser in Indo-US deal: MK Narayanan

New Delhi, Mar 17 (UNI) Declaring there there is no winner or loser in the Indo-US nuclear agreement, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan has made it clear that both the countries have ''conceded'' to the maximum ''extent possible'' to clinch the deal.

''There is no issue of winning or losing. Both sides go to the extent possible. We both have conceded,'' Mr Narayanan, a key negotiator of the agreement, said in an interview to ''The Week'' magazine.

He made the observation in reply to a question over the Americans ''facing flak for conceding too much'' by agreeing to provide nuclear fuel and technology to India for power generation.

Explaining that India had also made concessions, he said ''someone could argue, why can't the world give us nuclear fuel without separation? Or why we should have a different kind of conditions than the US.'' ''So we tried to reach a compromise which keeps our needs at one level and what we cannot afford to give up (nuclear weapons programme) on the other,'' he said, apparently referring to the separation plan under which 14 of India's 22 nuclear facilities would be thrown open for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The whole idea of this civil nuclear cooperation ''is to keep our strategic programme and at the same increase multifold our nuclear energy generating capacity,'' he said.

Rejecting a suggestion that by making India's energy programme nuclear-centric, the country would be ''too dependent'' on the fuel suppliers, he said ''that is true if you are dependent on oil also.

Or dependent on uranium...And the price of oil is going up. ''At the moment uranium is relatively cheap, but yes, as people begin to use it, prices will go up. Certainly there is a time lag. But we are looking at a time lag of about 30-40 years till our thorium reserves come into play.'' Asked about the criticism that India's nuclear deterrent policy was not transparent, he said ''Why should we tell this to anybody? Let them (wonder) whether we have 500 bombs or 100 bombs. That is for us to decide,'' he said.

The whole idea of a deterrent was that people should have a feeling that there was something. ''It is like a bank balance. Why should we tell everybody what our bank balance is? No country does it.'' MORE UNI SN AT KN1904