Aussie PM rejects India plea for uranium, but signals change ahead - Yahoo! News

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia will not sell uranium to nuclear-armed India for the moment, Prime Minister John Howard said, as India reportedly pressed for a change in Canberra's policy.
Howard said nothing had happened to make it abandon its stand against selling uranium to countries that refuse to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
"Certainly our policy to date has been to prohibit sales to countries which are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty," Howard told Australian Associated Press news agency.
"And that's why at the moment we couldn't, without changing policy, sell to India, but we can to China."
However, he said the government was open to change, the prime minister signalled.
"As time goes by, if India were to meet safeguard obligations, some Australians would see it as anomalous that we would sell uranium to China, but not India," Howard said.
The Fairfax newspaper group reported Monday that India is urging the Australian government to change its policy and supply uranium for the country's nuclear reactors.
But the government is divided on the issue, with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile opposed to abandoning the policy, according to Fairfax.
Australia, which has the world's largest known reserves of the nuclear fuel, prohibits the sale of uranium to countries that have not signed the NPT.
The national security adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, M K Narayanan, and Singh's spokesman Sanjay Baru told Fairfax they wanted Australia to reconsider, but insisted that a refusal would not hurt the relationship between the two countries.
India first requested the policy shift in March that it be permitted to import Australian uranium, and the request was still being considered by the government, Howard told AAP.
The moves came as the US Senate prepared to consider a controversial civilian nuclear energy deal, already passed by the House of Representatives, that would reverse three decades of US policy restricting India's access to nuclear technology.