An agreement to sign the CTBT would be contingent on the kind of concessions the West is prepared to offer. At the same time, there is no question of halting the ongoing programme to weaponise and deploy nuclear missiles. As the bargaining assumes momentum, the Government seems hopeful of a breakthrough before US President Bill Clinton's visit to the sub-continent in November. This is based on signals from Washington that Clinton wants the US Senate to ratify the CTBT by the year end. An Indian signature on the treaty would help the US President considerably.

Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Jaswant Singh's scheduled talks with US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in Frankfurt on July 9 is therefore crucial. The Vajpayee Government now appears to have givenup the insistence that India be recognised as a nuclear weapon state. This was disclosed by Foreign Secretary K Raghunath to the members of the Standing Committee of the Ministry of External Affairs last week.

Raghunath said that India was prepared to accept de facto recognition and was instead working to ``bring into being a system in which technology denial based on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is abolished''. In other words, New Delhi wants to work around the restrictions imposed by the NPT on the transfer of dual-use technology to non-nuclear weapon states which are not signatories to the treaty such as India. The ongoing talks with the P-5 seek to extract concessions on these lines.

On one such restriction, India would want the provision for full-scope safeguards for nuclear power plants built with western assistance removed. Instead, it wants the safeguards to be facility-specific so that the indigenously built nuclear plants are not thrown open to international scrutiny. In this context,the Governments sees the recently concluded agreement with Russia on the Kudankulam nuclear power plant as an important step. Russia has agreed that international safeguards be limited to this plant only.

France too is said to have favourably to Indin overtures.