[A] prominent Indian scientist who had planned to take
part in a scientific conference in Virginia this week was
not granted a United States visa, prompting charges by
American physicists that Washington is breaking precedent
by imposing political restraints on the free exchange of
scientific information.
The scientist at the center of the controversy is Dr.
Rajagopal Chidambaram, the chairman of India's Atomic
Energy Commission, who is also the vice chairman of the
International Union of Crystallographers.
He was to have attended a meeting of the American
Crystallographic Association in that capacity. The meeting is
being held in Arlington, Va., but the Indian scientist had to
cancel his travel plans when he was informed that his visa
would be delayed indefinitely.
The State Department insisted Tuesday that it did not deny
the visa; it just did not act on the request. "We're in the
midst of a review of our whole science and technology
relationship with India, and while that review is going on,
we thought it best" not to act on the request, a State
Department official said.
Dr. Chidambaram is one of a number of Indian and Pakistani
nuclear physicists whose requests for American visas have
been placed under indefinite "review" by the State Department
in response to the nuclear bomb tests carried out by those
two countries in May. Another was Dr. Srinath Chellavaraja,
an expert in theoretical particle physics at the Tata
Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, who sought in
vain to attend a meeting in Boulder, Colo., recently.
Dr. Chidambaram has aroused the Administration's ire for
several reasons, not the least of which was his recent role
in India's purchase of two Russian nuclear reactors pable to
produce plutonium that could be reprocessed to make bomb
fuel.
Officials of the 41,000-member American Physical Society, a
leading professional society of physicists, have protested
and warned that the State Department's action may set a
dangerous precedent.
Dr. Irving A. Lerch, director of the society's international
affairs department, said in an interview that even during the
height of the cold war, Soviet scientists were granted visas
to the United States. Not only did this preserve some freedom
to exchange scientific information, he said, but it also
"served as a confidence-building mechanism that helped to
defuse crises in relations."
Ordinarily, Dr. Lerch said, the State Department accedes to
visa requests underwritten by the American Physical Society.
"We get Cuban scientists, Libyans and other nationalities,"
he said, adding that the society wants the scientific
exchanges even though it does not approve of the recent
nuclear tests.
The State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, denied in an
interview that granting visas to Indian and Pakistani
scientists would be analogous to the issuance of visas to
Soviet scientists during the cold war.
"We have a full-fledged, broad and largely friendly
relationship with both India and Pakistan, which was not the
case during the cold war with the Soviet Union," he said. "At
that time, scientific and technical exchanges often had a
value above and beyond the technical information that was
being discussed."
The journal Nature reported that Canada has informed the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that it too
"would not welcome" nuclear experts from India to meetings in
Canada "until further notice." Nature also said Britain has
cut off contact with Indian and Pakistani nuclear
researchers.