The Hindu : Front Page : India, U.S. nuclear talks set for this week

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Monday, May 28, 2007
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India, U.S. nuclear talks set for this week

Siddharth Varadarajan

Nicholas Burns to push 123 agreement before Bush-Manmohan meeting

New Delhi: With major differences over the contours of the proposed India-U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement still persisting, Washington's point man on the issue is coming here this week for another round of talks aimed at closing the deal.

According to official sources, U.S. Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns will arrive on May 31 and hold talks with Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon.

Asked for confirmation of these dates, a U.S. Embassy spokesperson said a formal announcement to this effect had not yet been made in Washington.

Burns visit

The idea of Mr. Burns' visit "in the second half of May" was first flagged by the U.S. State Department after his meeting with Mr. Menon in Washington on May 1. Though both claimed that "considerable progress" was made, their technical teams failed to reach agreement in subsequent parleys, resulting in postponement of Mr. Burns' visit.

Senior officials here familiar with the status of the talks on the accord — known as the `123' agreement — told The Hindu on Sunday that the technical talks in London on March 20 and 21 could not lead to resolution of outstanding differences on a range of outstanding issues. Top among these is Washington's insistence on including legal penalties in the event of a nuclear test by India, something New Delhi says it never agreed to in the July 2005 agreement.

"The reality is that we find ourselves stuck with an American law that has not been amended and was never sought to be amended (by the Bush administration)," an official said, referring to the section of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act that mandates the incorporation of a nuclear test penalty clause in any bilateral agreement with a country that is not a nuclear weapons state under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

"Even though we made this point repeatedly, they sought to ignore it. So now we are both stuck," he said.

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