Joint Statement of July 18, 2005
India and the US announced that they would co-operate in civil nuclear energy in the Joint Statement of July 18, 2005 by PM and President Bush during the visit of PM to Washington.
Understanding
It was envisaged that the United States would adjust its laws and policies and work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India. Reciprocally, India committed itself to identifying and separating civilian and military nuclear facilities in a phased manner, placing voluntarily its civilian nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards, signing an Additional Protocol and continuing India’s voluntary and unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.
Separation Plan and Passage of Enabling Legislation by the US
To implement this, several important steps have been completed already: a Separation Plan was agreed to at the time of President Bush’s visit to India in March 2006. This was followed by the passage of the enabling legislation in the US Congress, exempting the requirement, vide Section 123(a) (2) of the US Atomic Energy Act of full-scope safeguards as a condition for civil nuclear cooperation with India. The US Congress passed the legislation with bipartisan majority support. This cleared the way for the next important step – of concluding a bilateral agreement on peaceful uses of nuclear energy to implement the understandings of July 2005 and March 2006.
Negotiations
Five rounds of negotiations took place between June 2006 and July, 2007. The objective of the negotiations was to incorporate into a legal agreement the political understandings and commitments of July 2005 and March 2006 and the terms and basic principles listed out in the statement of Prime Minister in Parliament on August 17, 2006.
Features of the Agreement