ISLAMABAD: US Senator and leading Democrat John Kerry said on Saturday that Pakistan ought eventually to have the same access as rival India to civilian nuclear technology, but indicated changes were needed first.

A landmark US-India accord, agreed in principle last July but still to be negotiated in detail, would grant New Delhi access to nuclear technology it has been denied for three decades, provided it separates civilian and military facilities.

But critics in the US Congress and elsewhere say the plan undermines non-proliferation goals and should be tightened up.

Kerry, a member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, told reporters in Pakistan he had backed "in principle" the plan for India during a visit to New Delhi this week, but stressed it still needed to be fleshed out, especially with respect to separation of civilian and military facilities.

After talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in Islamabad, he said he had discussed steps Pakistan needed to think about as it moved towards equal treatment with India. "The goal ought to be able to have, obviously, equality in that process," he said.

Kerry said change was needed in Pakistan and "...I think Pakistan is moving in a direction, hopefully."

Kerry said he expected the issue to be discussed in months ahead and added that he was confident President George W. Bush would discuss it when he visited the region in the future.

"In the meantime, I think we all ought to try and find a way that we can find that common ground so that we can make it possible," he said.

For more than three decades, the United States led the global fight to deny India access to nuclear technology because it rejected the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed nuclear weapons, testing them in 1974 and again in May 1998.

But Bush, aiming to improve ties with New Delhi, turned this approach on its head with last July's agreement.

Pakistan built its first nuclear power station in 1972 with Canadian help, but Western countries later halted co-operation.

Pakistan exploded its first nuclear device to rival India's weapons' capability in May 1998.

Quake relief

Kerry toured earthquake-devastated parts of northern Pakistan on Friday, distributing school uniforms and meeting local leaders at a tented village funded partly by both the United States and Cuba.

"We're sorry you have to go through this," said Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts and veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The former presidential candidate toured a tent village housing around 18,000 survivors of the October 8 magnitude 7.6 quake which killed some 87,000 people and left 3.5 million homeless, mostly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and the country's North West Frontier Province.

Striding between neat rows of plastic tents erected with the help of the United States, Cuba and China, Kerry also visited a makeshift school that now serves around 3,000 children. Many of the students had never been to school prior to being housed in Meira.

"It's more impressive in many ways that what I expected," said Kerry, who is on a 12-day tour that includes stops in Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan and Iraq. "It's also really impressive to see the co-operative effort of countries from around the world."

Source: China Daily