No legal commitment on testing: Saran

LONDON: India said it is committed to unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing but will not get into a legal commitment barring it from carrying out further testing.

“We are not in a position to deviate from the July 18 joint statement,” Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, who held talks with US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns here on implementation of the Indo-US nuclear deal, said.

On whether he had made it clear to Burns that India would not accept any such change in July 18 agreement, he said “it remains our position that such clause has no place in the bilateral agreement, precisely because it would change what is a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, a commitment which has been made by India, into a legal commitment. So we have pointed this out to the American side. But at the same time we have conveyed quite categorically that we are committed to the unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.”