In copious post mortems of what many believe to be the United States' flawed non-proliferation policies, analysts uniformly point out that New Delhi's nuclear program was sparked off by the supply of India's first atomic reactor by Canada in the 1960s. Washington itself helped India run the Tarapur power plant and trained Indian scientists and technicians in plutonium extraction methods, several proliferation experts said.

But more surprising is the assertion that India had finagled technology as late as 1995 to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. According to some experts, the United States sold India super computers and advanced CAD/COM software thatcould be used for weapons design. India also acquired advanced control room and robotics technology that could be used to handle dangerous materials, analysts claim.

Proliferation activists also say the US Commerce Department cleared for export to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, an IBM supercomputer that could have been used for weapons designing. The supercomputer, with a capacity of more than 11,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS), is small beer compared to the latest number crunchers (even Deep Blue II, the computer which beat Garry Kasparov was more powerful), but proliferation hawks are saying its power ``far exceeds the systems American scientists used to develop the United States' current nuclear stockpile''.

``It is a fact that despite strict controls, there were feelers from India for new supercomputers. But I am not aware of anything that might have gone to the DRDO or the nuclear establishment for weapons designing,'' George Perkovich, a proliferation expert who iswriting a book on India's nuclear program told The Indian Express.

Indian officials said no US supercomputer was sold to India in recent times and certainly none went to the DRDO. ``I am not even sure if you can call something of 11,000 MTOPS a supercomputer now,'' said R John Augustus, an Indian official who deals with technology related matters, while pointing out that IISC was a purely academic institution. But American proliferation activists were more suspicious.

``Most of these items are dual use and can easily be diverted to a weapons program,'' said Gary Milholin, an acknowledged proliferation hawk who believes the United States ought not to be selling even a screwdriver to India. Although IISC does not figure in the Commerce Department's checklist of possible nuclear and missile proliferators, it does feature in Milholin's large list of nearly 100 Indian suspects. ``IISC is a definite proliferation risk,'' Milholin insisted.

According to nuclear historians, Canada supplied Cyrus, thereactor from which India extracted plutonium for its first nuclear test in 1974. Even before that thousands of Indian scientists had trained in the US under the `Atoms-For-Peace' program and learnt how to run nuclear installations. The programs also declassified and released thousands of technical papers which helped Indian nuclear scientists.

``This is not to denigrate the achievements of the Indian scientists, but without outside support India could not have done it,'' Michael Krepon, an arms control expert who heads the Stimson Center, said.

But other experts argued that there was a great deal of interdependence among nations when it came to the nuclear cycle and no country had done it alone. The US itself could not have made the bomb without European scientists. The US then helped Britain and France make the bomb, the Soviet Union prised out the bomb design from the Manhattan Project to make their bomb and went on to help China which in turn helped Pakistan while the French helped Israel.

``Tosingle out India for learning from the US and others would be patently unfair. Everyone has done it sometime or the other,'' Perkovich said. In contrast to the frequent acknowledgment about India's largely indigenous effort, US experts do not hold back in using words like ``stolen'', ``smuggled'' and ``cheated'' when describing Pakistan's nuclear program. In fact, state department papers say Pakistan ``stole'' the uranium enrichment blueprint from Holland in the 1970s.