Vienna: Describing the "clean and unconditional exemption" India wants from the Nuclear Suppliers Group as being of "crucial importance" to the successful implementation of the Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Anil Kakodkar said on Saturday that the inclusion of conditions "would literally take away with one hand what has been given with the other."
| Kakodar, India's chief negotiator with the IAEA, designed the Plutonium core for India's first atomic bomb and assembled the device at the test shaft in the Rajasthan desert in 1974. He also helped design Dhruva, India's main weapons plutonium production reactor. His latest reactor design is this - the AHWR, which will burn Thorium fuel |
In an exclusive interview to The Hindu the morning after the International Atomic Energy Agency approved Indias safeguards agreement, Dr. Kakodkar also spelt out for the first time the conceptual difference between the Indian and American approaches to the NSG issue.
The suppliers group was a cartel that had rules for the sale of nuclear material to non-nuclear weapon states and its guidelines were therefore riddled with extraneous conditions which had no relevance to India, he said. "The NSG guidelines apply to non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS). So our preference is for the NSG to simply say that these guidelines do not apply to India. If they are unwilling to say that, at a minimum, the requirement of full-scope safeguards and other prescriptive elements in the guidelines that are intended for NNWS must be waived for India."
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