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Indian scientists are expressing concern that Washington's decision to refuse the entry of Indian atomic and missile scientists into the United States could affect the free exchange of information between the two countries and set back scientific cooperation.

The US decision was made in response to the nuclear tests conducted by India in May. The Indian warnings follow the denial of a US visa to Rajagopalan Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), preventing him from visiting Atlanta to attend the annual meeting of the International Union of Crystallography, of which he is vice-president.

Chidambaram had applied for a visa not as chairman of the AEC but in his individual capacity as a crystallographer. But the US state department has said that the Clinton administration is reviewing its science and technology engagement with both India and Pakistan after the tests, and that the processing of Chidambaram's visa application was “part of this review process”.

Officials in Washington say they have no intention of imposing across-the-board visa restrictions on scientists from either country, and that restrictions will be applied only to individuals engaged in nuclear and missile development.

But Indian scientists fear that the new rules will be extended to scientists in universities or national laboratories whose research may be remotely connected with nuclear or missile development. The US visa policy “will definitely have a nuisance value for us, but we have to accept this as part of life”, says Valangiman Ramamurthi, secretary of India's ministry of science and technology.

Chidambaram is not the only top atomic scientist to have been denied a visa by a western country following the Indian nuclear tests. Placid Rodriguez, director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) at Kalpakkam near Chennai, and his colleague Baldev Raj have both been denied visas to enter Britain. The two researchers had been invited to a Cambridge meeting by a UK publishing company.

In a separate case, Baldev Raj and S. B. Bhoje, director of IGCAR's reactor division, had to abandon planned visits to institutions in Germany after authorities there “suddenly” withdrew their invitations.