"I would ask Bill Clinton only one question," Fernandes said in an interview to The New York Times, a week before his 9-day State visit to China.

"And it would be this: why is it that you feel yourself so close to China, that you can trust China with nuclear weapons, just as you can trust yourselves with nuclear weapons, and you can trust the Russians and the French and the British, but you cannot trust India?" He called American policies on nuclear weapons as "hypocritical" because they sought to entrench the arsenals of the five established nuclear powers -- the US, Russia, Britain, France and China -- while "shutting out countries like India that believe they need nuclear weapons for theirown defence."

Fernandes said Indian leaders had noted recent news reports in which Clinton Administration officials had spoken of the United States and China becoming "strategic partners" and of plans for an agreement that neither side would aim nuclear missiles at the other. At the same time, he said, the United States was leading efforts to punish India with economic sanctions. According to the daily, he hinted at the kind of nuclear arsenal India intends to develop in the wake of the five nuclear tests it conducted and the six tests Pakistan carried out.

He said the Indian arsenal would be only enough to act as a deterrent to potential aggressors, and that India would not get drawn into the kind of nuclear arms race that led the US and the Soviet Union to amass huge stockpiles.

Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.