White House rebuffs NPT lobby (Hindustan Times)

[struggle4progress]

S Rajagopalan
Washington, January 19, 2006

The Bush administration has delivered a stinging rebuff to Washington's non-proliferation lobby over its insistence that India be pinned down for its "violation" of the 1956 agreement over the "peaceful uses only" CIRUS reactor ...

The NPT lobby is insisting that CIRUS should be classified as a civilian reactor and thrown open to international monitoring. Its contention has been that India has diverted plutonium from the reactor to the weapons programme. The 40 MW reactor was supplied by Canada, while the US provided heavy water for the project.

Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Monterrey Institute Centre for Non-proliferation Studies here, has been in the forefront of the CIRUS campaign. According to him, India's "misuse" of plutonium from this reactor was not confined to its first nuclear test in 1974, but has been "an ongoing offence over the years" ...

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1603215,0035.htm