Senior US and Indian officials will meet here next week amid US "frustration" at the pace of negotiations on a landmark deal to give India access to US nuclear technology, a US spokesman said Friday.
Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shanker Menon will be in Washington Monday and Tuesday and will meet with Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns to discuss the negotiations, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. McCormack said there was "some frustration on the part of the administration as well as Congress on the pace of these negotiations."
"We still have faith that we're going to be able to get this agreement done, but we're at a stage in these particular negotiations where we think we need to raise the level of dialogue to a political level," he said. The agreement, initially reached in July 2006, gives India unprecedented access to US nuclear fuel and technology for its civilian power sector without requiring New Delhi to sign a nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty as normally required by US law.
The deal has been defended by President George W. Bush's administration as the centerpiece of a new relationship between the US and India following decades of Cold War tensions. But the negotiations have bogged down, notably over India's refusal to commit formally to its voluntary unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and its insistence the deal gives it the right to reprocess nuclear fuel.
Both elements would contravene US laws. McCormack said an experts level meeting to discuss the outstanding differences was held in South Africa earlier this week but failed to make headway, prompting Washington to request next week's talks. While not going into details of the Indian demands, McCormack said they had "suggested solutions that would require us to change our laws, and we're not going to do that."