NEW DELHI, 12 June 2006 — A team of United States officials was scheduled to arrive here yesterday to hold talks with its Indian counterparts on a bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement, officials said. The team comprising members of the US State and Energy departments and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was to hold three days of talks beginning Monday, a US Embassy official said.
The talks on the Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, or 123 agreement, “reflect a desire to establish a framework for broad-ranging peaceful nuclear cooperation,” the official said.
On July 18, 2005, US President George W. Bush pledged in a joint statement with visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to help India develop the peaceful use of atomic energy provided it separated its nuclear facilities into military and civilian categories and placed the latter under international safeguards. The agreement was finalized during Bush’s trip to India in March 2006.
The agreement can, however, be implemented only after the US Congress passes an amendment to the country’s nuclear energy law, which bars nuclear trade with countries that are not signatories of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The 123 agreement to be discussed at the meeting in New Delhi is part of the process of formalizing the Bush-Manmohan agreement. It gets its name from Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954 that stipulates an agreement for cooperation is a prerequisite for a nuclear deal between the US and another nation.
Major sticking points in the proposed 123 agreement include a provision that bars India from conducting any nuclear tests in the future and another that says the US will have the right to stop nuclear cooperation if India detonates a nuclear device, Indian diplomatic sources said.
India has conveyed to the US that such provisions have no place in the civilian nuclear energy cooperation deal between the two countries proposed in the July 2005 joint statement and India is bound only by its continuing commitment to a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.
India announced the unilateral moratorium soon after it carried out nuclear tests in 1998 and claims the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are discriminatory.
Manmohan leads a fragile coalition government and both his leftist allies and the opposition parties are wary of the Indo-US deal compromising India’s long-term strategic policies.
US officials have conveyed to their Indian counterparts that talks on the 123 agreement were crucial as a positive outcome would provide impetus to the administration’s lobbying for the nuclear deal in the US Congress, diplomatic sources said.
The US Congress goes into recess in the first week of July and then into preparation for mid-term elections in November.
