US seeks Asian moratorium on N-weapons production

WASHINGTON: The United States is pushing for an Asian moratorium on nuclear weapons production in view of the "relationship between India, Pakistan and others" and has asked New Delhi to be "helpful" on that, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said.

"On the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty absolutely. We are trying to get the work done on that ourselves. We've told the Indians they need to be helpful in that. They've promised that they will," Rice said on Wednesday at the Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on the Indo-US nuclear agreement.

"And we will press them very hard to help us on the—and they should know, too, that, by the way, it's one of the determinations that the president will have to make. So we have that leverage," she said, responding to a question from Senator John Kerry.

 "We would like to see, obviously, in the regional sense in the relationship between India and Pakistan and others, a look at regional moratorium on fissile material production.
 
"We've made it very clear that we would encourage that; that we would encourage India and Pakistan to look at their nuclear relationship and the way that in some of the earlier days people were concerned about safety and security between the US and Soviet arsenals. So there are a lot of things that we could do," Rice said.

Fissile materials are Plutonium or highly enriched Uranium, which fuel nuclear explosions.