India should open up nuclear establishment: Expert

Posted on 7th Jan 2015 by mohit kumar

New Delhi, Jan 6 (IANS) India's nuclear establishment needs to open up more to improve India's international acceptability, said a top expert here Tuesday.

Rakesh Sood, former special envoy of the prime minister on disarmament and proliferation, said though India has been opening up after joining the nuclear community, there is need to do more which will improve India's status in the world community.

He was speaking after releasing an international study report, titled "Nuclear Security in India", authored by Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan of Observer Research Foundation and published by ORF.

"It is a pity we haven't done enough and also not projecting effectively our robust system," he said, adding he agreed with the report's suggestion that India should improve its outreach efforts.

Sood said India is at the most vulnerable spot in the world where there is a great danger of jihadists getting possession of nuclear materials in Pakistan.

Rajagopalan said "though India has a robust nuclear security regime in place, we could possibly do better job of advertising to the world that we do. This becomes particularly important in a globalised world when we are dependent on other countries for a variety of issues, like India's case of membership into some of the technology export control groups, including the Nuclear Suppliers Group," according to an ORF press release.

Explaining the importance of nuclear security, she said the International Atomic Energy Agency's Incident and Trafficking Database states that between January 1993 and December 2013, there were a total of 2,477 incidents of thefts and other unauthorised activities involving nuclear and radioactive materials.

In 2013 alone, there were 146 incidents confirmed in the IAEA database, she noted.

The ORF research team also studied nuclear safety and security measures in three other countries - Britain, France and Japan.

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