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Nuclear deal critic wants Delhi to seek access to US facility
(Gulf News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)New Delhi: A leading critic of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's efforts to forge a nuclear partnership with the United States has said that instead of asking for uninterrupted fuel supply for the two nuclear reactors Tarapur 1 and II, India should ask for access to the National Admission Facility at Berkeley, California.
"We've played a big part in India raising the bar when it began negotiating with the United States," said Bharat Karnad, of the Centre for Policy Research, who says his campaign in the past six months ran counter to that of many in this country "overawed by the notion that America is courting us".
"We must tell them we want to test our thermo-nuclear device. What do we want with fuel for the ageing Tarapur reactor which is already 37 years old. Its life span is 40. It should be junked."
Tarapur provides electricity to the key industrial state of Maharashtra and suffered a huge jolt when the US went back on its agreement to supply fuel in 1979 after India tested its nuclear weapons.
Former Department of Atomic Energy chief P.K. Iyengar said that while former prime minister Indira Gandhi persuaded the US to reverse that decision when Jimmy Carter was president, subsequent US governments played tough, with Canada too backing out, leaving only Russia as the reliable supplier of nuclear fuel.
Karnad said that in return for placing 65 per cent of India's nuclear reactors under safeguards, India should ask for much more. Karnad says India's nuclear scientists and strategic analysts believe their "sustained, non-institutional pressure" succeeded in forcing Singh's government to re-evaluate positions on the country's nuclear industry, particularly its nascent Fast Breeder Reactor programme. He said they remain hopeful the Indo-US nuclear deal will not go through.
The FBR has been successfully kept out of the international inspections regime by Prime Minister Singh after Department of Atomic Energy chairman Anil Kakokdar went public with the scientists' reservations on the "separation plan [separating civilian from strategic/military facilities]". The analyst said "if not for the success of our campaign, the deal would have gone through on American terms".
He said it was vital India knows what it's negotiating for. "What kind of nuclear trade is of benefit? India's is a plutonium economy, while the rest of the world uses enriched uranium."
Karnad, who firmly believes his lobby has managed to "stall" the deal, thinks the only way India will be respected, not forced to accept an unfair nuclear regime, is if it develops a nuclear missile capability.
Manmohan puts emphasis on security
Staff Report
New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was keen to push for the success of the Indo-US nuclear deal for India's future energy security.
"We have large reserves of coal but extensive use of coal unless we use clean coal technology has environmental hazards of global warming and all that.
"If we had nuclear energy, that adds to our manoeuvrability in ensuring energy security," the Prime Minister said. Singh also stressed the track record of India in the realm of export controls. "We have an impeccable record. We have never been the source of unauthorised proliferation of hesitative technologies even when the provocation was there. We have a very tight system of export control," he said.
Singh said, "In fact before I went to the United States I got Parliament to pass the latest legislation which puts our export controls on the same footing as most of the developed countries when it comes to export of sensitive technologies."
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