India to keep option of nuke tests: Mukherjee
Foreign Desk Report

NEW DELHI—India on Tuesday said it will keep options open to conduct more nuclear weapons tests despite a deal with the United States to access long-denied Western civilian nuclear technology.
“We will keep our options open to conduct nuclear tests and the decision will be left to the wisdom of the authority at that point of time,” Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced in parliament. “We will not foreclose our option,” he said during a debate on the deal. The US President George W. Bush signed the controversial pact into law Monday and hailed it as a sign of warm ties between the world’s two largest democracies.
The agreement will pave the way for US sales of nuclear fuel and know-how to India for the first time since New Delhi tested a nuclear device in 1974, becoming an international atomic pariah. Mukherjee’s comments came after opposition leaders warned the deal could stump the military’s nuclear programme in India, which in 1998 exploded nuclear weapons and then imposed an unilateral moratorium on further testing.
Some Western critics warn that exempting India from the US ban on nuclear exports to non-signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) may hurt US efforts to confront North Korea and Iran over their atomic ambitions. Mukherjee attacked the NPT and said India, which declared itself a nuclear weapons states after 1998, will not sign the accord. “We consider it a fraud treaty which is creating a class where the nuclear weapons states will have the right of stockpiling, experiments. We refuse to accept this discriminatory treatment,” he told parliament’s upper house.
acked by American business, the United States aims to complete the remaining approvals for nuclear cooperation with India in roughly six months, but lingering questions could delay action, analysts said.
President George W. Bush signed a law on Monday that represents a major step toward allowing India to buy U.S. nuclear fuel and reactors for the first time in 30 years.
Beyond that, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group must change its rules governing nuclear trade; the International Atomic Energy Agency and Delhi must agree on a “safeguards” inspections regime. The U.S. Congress must also approve a second law — on technical details of the deal — before U.S. nuclear transfers to India can take place.
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said the technical agreement, called a 123 agreement after a section of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, would be concluded “in the next few months” and “there aren’t any major issues left to decide.”
After that comes the IAEA plan for inspecting 14 of India’s civilian nuclear plants and then the NSG rules change. Burns said: “I’ve talked to each one of those countries, and I’m confident that the Nuclear Suppliers Group will act.”
NSG members Russia, Germany, Britain, France, and Japan and Australia have all announced support for nuclear cooperation with India, he said. And after recent talks in Beijing, Burns concluded: “I do not believe the Chinese will block this.”
He acknowledged that Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have doubts but hoped they would eventually join a consensus favoring changing the NSG rules. The NSG prohibits trade with states that are not members of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and do not allow safeguards on all nuclear facilities — India, Israel, and Pakistan.
Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association said India and the IAEA are still debating inspections, and consideration by the NSG may not proceed easily either. India may accept safeguards only if the United States and others guarantee a steady nuclear fuel supply. Yet safeguards are meant to be permanent and this is underscored in the U.S. law Bush signed, he said.
Under the law, U.S. nuclear exports would be ended if India tested a nuclear weapon, as it did in 1998. Kimball said countries skeptical about allowing a nuclear trade exception for India may suggest alternative proposals. He wondered if the United States and China might try to cut deal under which China would allow nuclear trade with India if the NSG would at some point also permit nuclear trade with nuclear-armed Pakistan, India’s rival and China’s ally. Bush rejected a nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan over blackmarket sales involving A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, to Iran, Libya and North Korea.