Saran hardsells nuke deal

NEW YORK: Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran stressed on Wednesday that India was committed to nuclear non-proliferation as his visit to US began on an ominous note with two US lawmakers introducing a resolution in the House of Representatives opposing nuclear energy co-operation with India.

Saran is in Washington to share a road map for the separation of India's civilian and military nuclear facilities. Washington wants this in place ahead of President Bush's India visit early next year.

Democrat Ed Markey, who co-sponsored the resolution with his Republican colleague Fred Upton said the deal posed "grave security implications." Markey  cited US laws that prohibit the sale of nuclear technology to any country like India who refuse to sign the Non Proliferation Treaty.

In a talk on Wednesday in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Saran tried to silence critics and reach out to the US lawmakers with assurances that India was deeply committed to combating nuclear proliferation.

"The July 18 joint statement underlines that our ties are anchored not only on common values but on common interests as well. These include promotion of democratic values and practices, combating terrorism and WMD proliferation," Saran told the thinktank.

Saran said that India had actually "undertaken additional commitments that place it in an 'NPT plus' category."

"Some experts have suggested what they term to be 'improvements' to the July 18 agreement. Let us be honest - these suggestions are deal breakers and are intended as such. The proposal for a moratorium on fissile material production was not part of this agreement and will not become so," said Saran.

Saran also said critics had pointed out that it would be difficult to implement the agreement but this was a non-issue.
"This is frankly a non-issue; having laboured over the mountain, we will not stumble on the molehill. Whatever we agree upon will be based on the reasonable premise that one side cannot carry all the risks. Therefore, there has to be a correlation between the actions of the two sides," said Saran. 

Saran also noted that it was wrong to say that civil nuclear energy was unimportant because it constituted only three per cent of India's current energy production. "Civil nuclear energy is currently limited precisely because of technology denial. If freed from current restrictions, there is little doubt that it will rapidly move into percentages of double digits," he said.