The United States has sent two senior officials to Vienna, Austria to lobby for its controversial nuclear deal with India before the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an international consultative group on controlling nuclear energy. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Richard Boucher and Assistant Secretary of State for International, Security, and Non-Proliferation Issues Stephen Rademaker will arrive in Vienna Thursday to brief members of the 44-nation group on Washington's plan to provide U.S. civilian nuclear technology to India. The agreement, signed earlier this month in New Delhi by President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, would give energy-hungry India access to long-denied civilian nuclear technology in return for making a majority of its nuclear reactors available to international inspection. The State Department's third-ranking official, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that the United States is hopeful about the outcome of the briefings to the NSG. "When you have leading members of the NSG-the United States, Russia, Britain, France, Australia-all speaking out in favor of this arrangement, I think that's a fairly compelling group of countries," Burns said. "We do have to reach consensus with the Nuclear Suppliers Group," Burns said, "and my very strong sense is that what we're going to hear tomorrow is a lot of countries are going to wait and see if the United States government is able to convince the U.S. Congress to pass the necessary legislation to allow this deal to go forward." "Once that happens, then I think sequentially the Nuclear Suppliers Group will then want to take action on its own to endorse the deal," Burns said. "I think that there'll be a very strong tide of support in the NSG in favor of this, but that's probably a few months away," Burns said.
