NEW DELHI: A nuclear accord hailed as the centerpiece of India's new friendship with the United States appears to be in jeopardy, as officials here argue about whether its limitations on Indian nuclear activities are an affront to the country's sovereignty.
The accord, which was announced by President George W. Bush last year and approved by the U.S. Congress, is now mired in the swamp of history and the complicated politics of nonproliferation. In effect, negotiations have been unable to resolve a central question: should India be treated as a recognized nuclear weapons state, one that retains the right to test its weapons and reprocess spent nuclear fuel?
Those two issues - testing and fuel processing - are proving more difficult to sort out than anyone anticipated. The dispute has come up as the two countries are trying to negotiate an the detail of the accord, known as a "123 agreement."
The Indian side has resisted provisions in that agreement that could prohibit India from conducting further nuclear weapons tests and put restrictions on whether it can reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
The United States fears that the reprocessed fuel could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium for a new generation of nuclear weapons, undermining Bush's argument that the unusual deal with India would aid nonproliferation.
The deal is not necessarily doomed. But the sticking points are so politically contentious that they make it extremely difficult for either Bush or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India to break the impasse easily.
U.S. and Indian negotiators conferred last week on the sidelines of a meeting of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group in South Africa, but failed to hammer out a final deal. Washington has made it clear that it has already made plenty of concessions to Indian demands, and Bush administration officials have openly stepped up pressure.
"We are frustrated it has taken this long," R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, said in a telephone interview from Washington on Thursday. "We would have hoped for faster progress. But we do not doubt their good faith. We are friends. We will get through this."
Burns said the Indian foreign secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon, had been invited to Washington for talks early next month, and Burns then plans to travel to India.
Completion of the deal will determine whether India can buy nuclear fuel and reactors from the United States - or anywhere else. Until the 123 agreement is sealed, the exclusive Nuclear Suppliers Group, a loose organization of countries that sell nuclear equipment and material, will not open the doors to nuclear commerce with India.
The U.S.-Indian nuclear pact, announced in March 2006, would allow India access to civilian nuclear technology, overturning a decades-old ban that resulted from India's refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. India has possessed nuclear weapons for more than 30 years; it detonated its first device in 1974. The country waited until 1998 before exploding another weapon - a test that Pakistan answered with one of its own.
India also wants to generate nuclear power to meet its growing energy demand, which it says is its principal motivation for striking a deal with the United States. In exchange for the right to buy reactors and fuel on the world market, it has agreed to allow international inspections of its civilian nuclear facilities, which it has promised to segregate from its military arsenal.
The U.S. Congress last year gave its initial approval to the Bush administration to allow the sale of nuclear technology to India. The congressional blessing - preceded by intense lobbying - was advertised in Washington and New Delhi as a signal of India's growing importance to the United States.
The deal was opposed by many groups concerned with nonproliferation, which argued that the Bush administration was setting a bad precedent by agreeing to sell nuclear technology and fuel to a country that for years had declined to join the nonproliferation treaty. Opponents of the deal argued that Bush won no limits on the development of new Indian nuclear weapons.
For his part, the Indian prime minister, Singh, expended considerable political capital on selling the deal at home, where distrust of U.S. interests prevails, particularly among atomic scientists and the government's leftist allies.
"Were this deal to collapse now, after so much effort and hype, it would represent a substantial setback for the emerging partnership between the two countries," Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said in an e-mail message. "It would probably be many years before either side was willing to take political risks to rejuvenate the relationship."
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