US Vice President Dick Cheney warned Thursday that Congress would risk squandering a critical opportunity if it held up approval of a landmark civilian nuclear deal with India. "We hope Congress will be quick to enact legislation that enables our two nations to move forward on this important agreement without delay," Cheney said at a meeting of American and Indian business leaders in Washington.
Given the agreement's "strategic" importance, Cheney said "we must be sure amendments or delays on the US side do not risk wasting this critical opportunity."
He said he and President George W. Bush were confident however that the deal would receive "strong bipartisan support" in the US House of Representatives and Senate.
Key foreign policy committees of the two chambers would vote on the deal next week after poring over it for nine months.
Cheney called the deal, clinched in March between Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after an initial September 2005 agreement, as "one of the most important strategic foreign policy initiatives of the government."
The foreign relations committee of the House of Representatives will meet on June 27 and its Senate counterpart the next day to consider the deal, which requires mandatory Congress backing.
The panels' findings on the deal would then be submitted to the two full chambers for consideration.
The Bush administration wants to secure passage of the deal before the November mid-term Congressional elections but it apparently lacks wide and bipartisan backing.
The agreement would allow India, which is not a signatory of the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), access to long-denied civilian nuclear technology in return for placing a majority of its atomic reactors under international safeguards.
The Congress has to amend the US Atomic Energy Act, which currently prohibits nuclear sales to non NPT signatories.
Some legislators want to first study the international safeguards still being negotiated between India and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global nuclear watchdog.
The safeguards would be incorporated together with other key technical details in another bilateral agreement, which the lawmakers also wanted to study before endorsing the deal.
American weapons experts have warned that forging a civilian nuclear agreement with non-NPT member India would not only make it harder to enforce rules against nuclear renegades Iran and North Korea, but also set a dangerous precedent to other countries with nuclear ambitions.
