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Bush to sign Indo-US nuke bill on Monday
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 13 December 2006, 18:30 IST
Washington: Come Monday, all doubts about the Indo-US nuclear deal will be laid to rest. According to a White House statement, President George W Bush will sign the nuke bill into law on Monday, thus ending months of speculation.
The US Congress gave the final approval to the legislation on Saturday. The Bush Administration and its allies have campaigned vehemently for the deal saying it will help expand ties with the world's largest democracy and open up billions of dollars in trade for US companies.
Critics argue that the legislation will undercut all efforts to rein in the spread of nuclear weapons since it will clear the way for India to buy US nuclear reactors and fuel. Defendants of the deal argue that the legislation includes ample restraints; viz. in the event of India conducting nuclear tests in future, as it had done in 1998, the US president can stop exports of nuclear materials.
India, though upbeat about the nuclear cooperation deal being a big step forward in Indo-U.S. relations, is wary of conditions attached to it by Congress.
"The government has taken note of certain extraneous and prescriptive provisions in the legislation," External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the Parliament on Tuesday.
The deal has reversed 30 years of US policy that had opposed nuclear cooperation with India because the country developed nuclear weapons in contravention of international standards and never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.