No problem in overcoming contentious issues in US nuke deal: India

Washington, June 26 (UNI) The contentious issues in the finalisation of the ground-breaking deal for the United States to supply India with peacetime nuclear fuel does not have any insurmountable difficulties, but India would not want anything to undermine its strategic nuclear program.

Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment Conference International Non-proliferation Conference here yesterday, Indian High Commissioner to Singapore, Jai Shankar, said the deal is neither an arms control agreement nor a negotiation over India's strategic nuclear program.

Despite several rounds of talks on the deal, officials from both countries say that while some progress has been made, the deal, known as the 123 agreement, is not yet complete because they have not been able to resolve key differences to ready the pact for presentation to legislative bodies in their respective countries.

The opposition in India contends that any deal with the United States must not impinge on India's sovereignty. It firmly believes that the deal in its present form would forbid India from conducting future nuclear weapons tests while placing no such restrictions on the United States.

The United States wants India to have separate civilian and military nuclear facilities and allow its nuclear programs to be scrutinised by international inspectors, even though India is not a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

''Basically, I do not think there are many problems. The issue is how you take broad political principles and make them into legal language,'' Mr Shankar, who has been associated with the negotiations, said.

While translating these principles ''You have to find very exacting, very rigorous language to reflect that. And that is where the challenge lies,'' he said.

He also underlined that India's strategic nuclear programme is clearly outside the purview of the Indo-US nuke deal and ''any attempts to intrude into that domain or determine externally what India regards as its national prerogative would obviously undermine the agreement.'' Among the contentious issues deliberated upon by the officials of the two countries were fuel supply assurances, reprocessing of spent fuel and future nuclear testing by India.

These differences arose from the Henry Hyde Act which was passed by the US Congress to allow civil nuclear trade with India after 32 years.

India maintains that this Act is not consistent with the earlier agreement endorsed by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during their understandings of July 18, 2005, and March 2006.

India also wants a commitment from the US on assured fuel supplies to the nuclear reactors that will be opened for international supervision.

UNI