Menon-Burns meet, to broker compromise

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, April 30, 2007 : India and the US are in the act of brokering a major compromise that will extract the bitterness out of the current negotiations over the ``123 nuclear agreement ‘’ when Foreign Secretary Shiv Shanker Menon and his counterpart, Nicholas Burns, meet in Washington DC tomorrow.

With both sides keenly aware that the nuclear negotiations are being closely followed not only at home, but also in the rest of the world, it seems as if New Delhi will be prepared to accept the US principle that if it carries out a nuclear test, it will have to suffer the consequences of the same.

In fact, far from the doomsday theories that have recently been bandied about over the demise of the bilateral nuclear agreement, New Delhi even seems pretty gung-ho about the success of the talks over the next few rounds.

Sources here argued that in keeping with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s commitment to Parliament, India will not barter away any rights to the US. On the other hand, the Indian negotiating team will have to be ``realistic and search for a compromise with the Americans,’’ just as US undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns seemed to be doing in his `Washington Post’ signed article two days ago.

For example, according to US law, any country other than the Permanent Five, is barred from carrying out a nuclear test, and if it does, it must face the serious consequences that follow.

This includes not only a complete stop to all the nuclear cooperation between the US and the offending country (in this case, India), but also the US right to take back all the equipment, material, technology, etc, that it has given to this country so far, a principle known as the ``right of return.’’

Even though India, after the Pokharan tests of 1998, has imposed a voluntary moratorium on testing, it has never been willing to bind itself internationally on this issue.

Indian scientists, especially from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), have argued that India, which has painfully built its nuclear programme over the decades in the face of international (read, American) hostility, cannot now be subject to US rules and conditions.

Fact is, however, that such a US law (called the ``right of return’’) exists and the Bush administration, considerably weakened by the Iraq fiasco, is in no mood to amend it only for India.

Under the circumstances, it seems as if India will have to come round to accepting the principle of the US ``right of return’’.

In exchange, the US will be persuaded to fudge the ``language of implementation’’ of this principle, highly placed sources said.

Meaning, even if India does violate US law and conducts a test, the manner and quality of the ``implementation’’ of the ``right of return’’ law will be so deliberately vague that in effect, India may not have to return the nuclear supplies (equipment, material, etc) that it has got from the US so far.

The second sticking point between India and the US at the moment revolves around the right to ``reprocess’’ the nuclear material that is produced by a nuclear reactor, spent fuel which is good enough to make nuclear bombs.

Once again all countries, except the Permanent Five, are enjoined to return this spent fuel to the country with whom they have an nuclear agreement, although the US has made exceptions – considerably complicated ones -- for countries like Japan and the Euratom Agency.

However, unlike the ``right of return’’ principle that is part of US law, the ``reprocessing’’ condition is not mandated by US law.

The Shankar Menon team now hopes not only to get an exception for India, just like Japan and the Euratom, but will argue that the ``very small amounts’’ of spent nuclear fuel that is produced in the Indian situation is hardly something that Washington need get nervous about.

Of course, the language of this particular clause will look into the ratio of spent fuel and the reprocessing quantity. Perhaps, New Delhi could give guarantees that the spent fuel will not be used in the military nuclear reactors that are out of US purview in the first place.

ENDS