Date:29/07/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/07/29/stories/2008072954841000.htm

Front Page

Mulford said NSG waiver would be clean, not unconditional

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: At his press conference on July 23, U.S. Ambassador David C. Mulford was emphatic about the proposed waiver for India at the Nuclear Suppliers Group not being “unconditional”.

“I don’t think that you should use the word ‘unconditional waiver’,” he said in response to a question about the NSG. “I mean, what we talked about is getting a clean exemption, that means an exemption that is not laden with detailed concerns that we believe are adequately dealt with elsewhere, for example in the 123 Agreement, and secondly in the IAEA safeguards agreement, and finally in the determinations the President has to make under the Hyde Act.” When the U.S. and other members of the 45-nation NSG “go through this top to bottom,” said Mr. Mulford, “we will be able to move forward with a clean exemption.”

To a follow-up question what sort of conditions the U.S. expected the NSG to impose if the waiver were not unconditional, the Ambassador backtracked somewhat. “Let me go back to this question ‘unconditional waiver’. All I said there was I didn’t think that was the right word. I didn’t say there were going to be conditions,” he clarified. “By referring to it as a clean exemption, what we mean there is [the NSG will] decide to go ahead and agree to support the various pieces that have been put together — the 123 Agreement, the IAEA safeguards … and also the review made by Congress and the presidential determinations which go with that. We hope every country will then say we think this does cover all the issues we have on our mind and that they come out with a consensus for a movement forward which does not have conditions attached to it by the NSG. That’s basically the situation.”

Though he said the waiver not being “unconditional” didn’t mean the NSG exemption would involve conditions, it is significant that Mr. Mulford has been particular about only using the word “clean” when speaking about the waiver.

Asked repeatedly by Karan Thapar on CNBC on July 23 about a “clean and unconditional waiver,” for example, the U.S. Ambassador again used the first term and not the second in his answers each time.

According to Indian officials, the U.S. has been saying for some months now that the NSG waiver could include “reasonable conditionalities” and that the Europeans were insisting on these.