KEY POINTS:
New Zealand could be persuaded to support a waiver allowing the go-ahead of a civilian-use nuclear agreement between the United States and India if its concerns were met, Disarmament Minister Phil Goff indicated yesterday.
At present, New Zealand had not made a decision, Mr Goff said as diplomatic pressure steps up ahead of a critical meeting in Vienna next week.
"We know that there is a lot of momentum and pressure for countries to agree to an exemption being given," Mr Goff told the Herald yesterday. "But we have genuinely held and sincere concerns that we want to see addressed."
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd confirmed this week that his country would support an exemption for India.
India sent its deputy secretary of Foreign Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri, to New Zealand this week to push India's case.
New Zealand is one of 45 countries on the Nuclear Suppliers Group that will meet in Vienna next week to discuss the agreement, which allows the United States to supply India with nuclear fuel and technology.
The NSG - formed in 1975 after India's nuclear testing - bans nuclear trade with states that are not members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
New Zealand and the US are members of both the NSG and signatories of the NPT. New Zealand is considered one of the tougher nuts to crack on the NSG.
Mr Goff said he met Mr Puri at the Beehive on Monday.
"I indicated that New Zealand had not reached a final position, that it was giving the issue careful and serious consideration, which we are, that we would be working with like-minded countries like Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland."
Mr Goff said the decision lay in weighing the balance between two propositions.
"Is granting an exemption something that would weaken the Non-Proliferation Treaty and are the advantages of having greater control over India's nuclear industry outweighed by the disadvantage of weakening the NPT?" Mr Goff said.
Mr Goff said that among the questions to be explored at next week's meeting would be:
* Whether conditions could be built into an exemption that meant the agreement would cease to exist if there were a testing of nuclear weaponry - as was already the case in the US legislation on the deal, the Hyde Act.
* Whether India would sign up to the "Additional Protocol" of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which gave greater powers of inspection for India's nuclear facilities.
* Questions of how to prevent transfer of sensitive technology such as enrichment and re-processing.
* Questions of confidence and transparency-building measures in any exemption.
* A question of what would happen if the safeguards agreement that India had entered into with the International Atomic Energy Agency were to be terminated.
Mr Goff said there were some benefits in the agreement - that more of India's nuclear power stations were coming under safeguard agreements.
"We acknowledged that there were some positive things about India's track record - though we didn't agree with either their testing or their possession of nuclear weapons."
Mr Goff said New Zealand's concerns were not particular to India or the United States.
"It is the wider ramifications."
New Zealand was interested in talking further to India "about what confidence we might have that the concerns that New Zealand and other like-minded countries possess can be addressed."
Mr Goff rejected a suggestion that New Zealand's hopes for free trade agreements with both the US and India would be harmed if it did not back a waiver.
