Washington, July 10: The Bush administration is privately threatening to leave the Nuclear Suppliers Group if it does not expeditiously approve the Indo-US nuclear deal by allowing member countries to engage in nuclear commerce with Delhi, a highly respected American arms control expert has alleged.

Henry Sokolski, who worked in the US defence secretary’s office as deputy for non-proliferation policy and was later a member of the CIA’s senior advisory panel, wrote in The Wall Street Journal today that “the US actually has been twisting arms at the NSG... and so dissolve the group if countries critical of the India deal did not fall into line on India”.

Sokolski’s allegation, though sensational, is not entirely fanciful. The US has a history of standing by its friends on nuclear issues.

In autumn 1982, after Israel’s expulsion from the IAEA General Conference, the agency’s highest policymaking body, for its bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, the US withdrew from the IAEA and suspended its contributions to the budget of the UN’s nuclear watch- dog.

The boycott did not last very long. Although Washington returned to the IAEA in early 1983, the episode was today being recalled widely within the strategic community here in the context of Sokolski’s allegation.

Making the NSG defunct is actually easy as pie. It is not even a structured body and has no secretariat.

Besides, the NSG was created in response to India’s nuclear test in 1974 and if the IAEA is integrating India into its “atoms for peace” framework, there could be logical questions about the need to continue with the 45-nation group.

Sokolski’s article about India’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA, appropriately titled ‘Negotiating India’s Next Nuclear Explosion’, is part of a campaign that is being hastily revived against the Indo-US nuclear deal, which non-proliferationists here had taken for dead.

Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert on the US East Coast who started ArmsControlWonk, a blog that put out the “restricted” India-specific safeguards agreement within hours after it was circulated in Vienna yesterday, said the agreement “stinks” because the word “perpetuity” does not appear even once in the draft in connection with placing Indian nuclear installations under IAEA scrutiny.

Speaking for the influential Arms Control Association here, its top official, Daryl Kimball, has appealed to the IAEA governors not to rubber stamp the safeguards pact when they take it up for review shortly.

The recently chosen chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, has not spoken yet about the moves in Vienna, but he has already said any progress on the nuclear deal must be “completely consistent with the Hyde Act” which continues to raise hackles in India.