VIENNA, Aug 29: The United States has told six nations its bid to lift a global ban on nuclear trade with India has stumbled over their objections and pressed them at a New Delhi meeting to relent, diplomats said on Friday.

Members of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) have balked at approving a waiver to its rules allowing business with India without conditions to help finalise Washington’s 2005 civilian nuclear cooperation deal with New Delhi.

An Aug 21-22 NSG meeting ended inconclusively after up to 20 member states called for changes to the US waiver draft to ensure Indian access to foreign nuclear markets would not indirectly benefit its atomic bomb programme.

The US-India deal has dismayed pro-disarmament nations and campaigners since India is outside the global Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed nuclear bombs in the 1970s with Western technology imported ostensibly for peaceful atomic energy.

Washington had been expected to rework the waiver draft in consultation with New Delhi for consideration at a second NSG meeting set for Sept 4-5 in Vienna next to the UN nuclear watchdog agency headquarters.

But diplomats, asking for anonymity due to political sensitivities, said the redrafting had run into Indian challenges and the US envoy to New Delhi protested to the leading six NSG hardliners at a meeting on Thursday.

Washington was shocked and India felt betrayed by the unproductive NSG meeting 10 days ago, US Ambassador David Mulford told envoys from New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands, according to the diplomats.

As a result, Mulford said negotiations with India on proposed amendments to the draft were in serious difficulty and the whole effort was in danger of breaking down, the diplomats told Reuters.

He was quoted as saying “non-proliferation bureaucrats” in Vienna seemed out of touch with political leadership and if they were going to insist on “the gold standard of non-proliferation”, there would be no waiver agreement.

Mulford, diplomats said, urged the six to “make a strategic and political choice” that might not be perfect in NPT terms but was the best achievable, given the shaky Indian governing coalition’s political inability to accept major NSG conditions.

India has insisted on a “clean, unconditional” NSG waiver. Above all, it rejects any change that would end its right to test nuclear arms even though US legislation itself mandates a halt to trade with India in the event of another test.

Washington and some allies assert the deal will shift India, the world’s largest democracy, towards the non-proliferation mainstream and combat global warming by fostering use of low-polluting nuclear energy in developing economies.

“While there is still a distance to go, the proposal to give India a clean exemption from global nuclear trade standards is in deep trouble,” Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association think tank in Washington wrote in a commentary on Thursday.

Some diplomats said that if a revised US draft was not circulated soon, there might not be enough time to scrutinise it and finalise positions for a Sept 4-5 meeting.—Reuters