Selling uranium to India but not Pakistan would be unfair because neither is a signatory to the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Pakistan's High Commissioner to Australia said Monday. "If Australia is going to lift the ban on a country which has not signed NPT, it is much hoped that will also apply to Pakistan the same way," Abdul Malik Abdullah told national broadcaster ABC.
At a weekend party conference in Sydney, the ruling Labour Party overturned its ban on uranium sales to countries that have not signed the NPT. The relaxation in the rules the Labour Party voted for was specifically for India. While neither India nor Pakistan is an NPT signatory, New Delhi has a good record on not selling nuclear secrets.
In contrast, scientist AQ Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, confessed in 2004 to illegally transferring nuclear technology to other countries. He was pardoned by the Pakistani government, which insists that it had no knowledge of Khan's trafficking. Prospective buyers of Australian uranium have to satisfy Canberra that the material would be used as a feedstock for generating electricity at nuclear power stations and not in a nuclear weapons programme.
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