NEW DELHI, 1 June 2007 — Sealing a much-touted civilian nuclear deal between the United States and India is going to take some hard work, a senior US official said yesterday as the two sides resumed talks on the pact.
The talks, ahead of a meeting in Germany between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George Bush, are expected to enable resumption of US-India nuclear trade after a 30-year gap. Ahead of the talks, US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told reporters: “We are nearly there. As the ambassador (David Mulford) said, some hard work has to be done.”
Describing the nuclear deal as the “most ambitious proposal” that the US has put forward in 30 years, Burns said: “It allows us to correct the major problem in Indo-US relations. So there are reasons to be optimistic about this agreement once we have had it nailed down. And we hope to make some progress over the next few days.”
Seen as the cornerstone of an emerging partnership between Washington and New Delhi after decades of Cold War wariness, the deal has been held up by disagreements over clauses that India says could limit its nuclear weapons program and, in the process, impinge on its sovereignty.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in that agreement,” Burns said ahead of the talks with his Indian counterpart, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon. However, he continued, “Some hard work has to be done.”
Neither Burns nor Indian officials offered any details on what issues remain to be settled, but one of the biggest sticking points has been India’s displeasure with a clause that allows the United States to halt cooperation if New Delhi tests a nuclear weapon.
Some in India also fear the deal could limit India’s right to reprocess spent atomic fuel — a key step in making weapons-grade nuclear material — and thus hamper its long-standing weapons program.
American critics, meanwhile, say the plan would spark a nuclear arms race in Asia by allowing India to use the extra nuclear fuel, which the deal would provide, to free up its domestic uranium for its weapons program.
Yesterday’s talks were the first bit of good news for the deal since an earlier round of high-level talks ended on May 1 with an optimistic pronouncement that Burns would be coming to India in the last half of May to finalize the pact, heralded as the first step in an emerging strategic partnership between New Delhi and Washington.
In the weeks since those talks ended, the optimism has given way to more neutral tones from officials on both sides.
