Wednesday, July 20 2005 15:09 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: The Bush administration has got a "fairly positive" response from its allies overseas and Congressional leaders on a new agreement to help India's civilian nuclear programme, a senior official has said.

"I don't expect a lot of opposition in Europe," US Under Secretary of State for political Affairs Nicholas Burns said. European leaders had been told in recent weeks that a deal might be in the works, he added.

However, as the status on the agreement was not clear till the last minute, there was no time to brief foreign and Congressional officials in advance, he told The New York Times.

Burns said, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also spoke yesterday to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and that his reaction was "constructive" and "not overly problematic."

The paper quoted a spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy, as saying there had been no reaction in Islamabad to the deal announced Monday, between President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Burns, who has been a point man in the India negotiations, said Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the National Security Adviser, had hammered out final details of the pact.

He said exempting India from the nonproliferation norms should not create problems for the administration's other efforts to try to get Iran and North Korea to adhere to Nonproliferation Treaty obligations. Both countries, he said, had signed the treaty, but then cheated.

'India is Unique'

"Everybody knows, when you stop to think about it, that India is unique," Burns said.

"India has also told the truth about what it's doing and is now willing to subject itself to intrusive inspections. Iran and N Korea signed the NPT and then did not abide by the rules. India wants to abide by the rules," he said.

An unidentified European diplomat said though the deal was a "step in the right direction" for India, because it would agree to safeguards for its civilian nuclear programme, it posed the risk of weakening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty "if it is poorly implemented." "India has to implement what it committed itself to, and perhaps go even further," the diplomat was quoted as saying in the paper.

The deal between India and the United States, the paper said, drew criticism from nuclear experts at research institutions specializing in efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and from a former top Bush administration official involved in the issue.

"It's disappointing that we've given something to India and not gotten something substantial in return," said John S. Wolf, a former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation affairs.

"This agreement is difficult to reconcile with the international norms advanced by the United States for the last 40 years."

Wolf, who is now president of the Eisenhower Fellowship programme, in Philadelphia, told the Times that experts on the issue at the State Department in the last term had resisted efforts to make a deal with India along the lines of the one announced Monday.