WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States and India have "moved beyond" bitter differences on nuclear weapons, a senior US official said, but more feuds could be on the horizon as President Barack Obama takes a harder anti-nuclear stance.
The world's two largest democracies both say they are ready for a deeper alliance, eyeing coordination on top priorities for Obama such as battling climate change and bringing stability to Afghanistan.
Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, delivering the Obama administration's first substantive remarks on relations with India, said Monday the United States sought a "third stage of rapprochement."
The two countries had uneasy relations during the Cold War and later came to loggerheads over India's decision in 1998 to test an atom bomb and gatecrash the elite club of nuclear weapons states.
But relations started warming in the late 1990s. Obama's predecessor George W. Bush later pushed a landmark deal giving India access to civilian nuclear technology despite its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Steinberg said India and the United States should work together for a "strengthened" NPT. He signalled there was no turning back on Bush's nuclear deal -- criticized by some members of Obama's Democratic Party as sending a bad signal to nation such as Iran accused of pursuing nuclear weapons.
"The agreement not only provides a concrete platform for economic and technological cooperation between our two countries but also offers a basis for moving beyond one of our most serious barriers to political cooperation -- the status of India's nuclear program," Steinberg told the Brookings Institution.
He said the United States welcomed Indian input in its new strategy to fight extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- a position that could trigger unease in Islamabad which historically sees New Delhi as the enemy.
Shyam Saran, India's special envoy on nuclear issues, told the same forum that the success pushing through the nuclear deal with the United States gave New Delhi "a welcome sense of vindication."
But he issued a pre-emptive warning to Obama that India would not accept the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In his campaign, Obama said he would push the US Senate to ratify it and encourage other nations to do likewise.
The CTBT would ban all nuclear explosions for any purpose. It cannot come into effect as nuclear powers such as the United States and China have not ratified it or, in the case of India and Pakistan, even signed it.
Saran said India opposed the CTBT because it "was not explicitly linked to the goal of nuclear disarmament."
"For India, this was crucial since it was not acceptable to legitimize, in any way, a permanent division between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states," he said.
Obama has also said he aspired to an eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.
His comments have brought cheers to anti-nuclear activists including aging survivors of the world's only atomic attacks in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Saran urged Obama to pursue the abolition idea, proposing that India and the United States start a working group at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to chart the path.
"If the world moves categorically towards nuclear disarmament in a credible time-frame, the Indo-US differences over the CTBT would probably recede into the background," Saran said.
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