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By Root 1097 0

in the aftermath of American bullying during the previous year’s conflict with Pakistan (and the subsequent formation of Bangladesh), and with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, under siege politically. If the nation would gain status from testing an atomic device, so, presumably, would its leader. Having worked through some problems concerning the test device’s initiator, the team was ready to go by the spring of 1974. Just after 8.00 a.m. on 18 May the Indians detonated a PNE at Pokhran, beneath the Rajasthan desert. Scientists estimated the blast at 12 kilotons, though much later revised the figure downwards; the Americans guessed the shot had produced between 4 and 6 kilotons.

It was ‘a peaceful nuclear explosion’, and Mrs Gandhi insisted that there was ‘nothing to get excited about’. Gandhi’s poll numbers spiked. A man delivering newspapers told a reporter for the Washington Post: ‘Now we’re the same as America and Russia and China. We have the atomic bomb.’ ‘I couldn’t escape the current of glee that streaked through me at the thought of what other nations would say,’ wrote the politician Raj Thapar, no friend of Mrs Gandhi. ‘They wouldn’t be able to kick us around as before.’ That was not quite the world’s reaction. Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, professed himself ‘determined not to be intimidated,’ and authorized a quickened pace for nuclear development by his country. China showed public restraint, while Canada made clear its anger over India’s evident militarization of its peaceful nuclear assistance. The American ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scolded Mrs Gandhi: ‘India has made a huge mistake. Here you were the No. 1 hegemonic power in South Asia. Nobody was No. 2 and call Pakistan No. 3. Now in a decade’s time, some Pakistani general will call you up and say I have four nuclear weapons and I want Kashmir. If not, we will drop them on you and we will all meet in heaven. And then what will you do?’

The answer was to slip back, for the time being, into a period of nuclear quiescence, under governments less convinced than Indira Gandhi’s of the utility of nuclear testing or bomb building, or sufficiently convinced that India’s status had been at least temporarily assured by the 1974 blast. Moral doubt about nuclear weapons persisted in some quarters, including those of Moraji Desai, Prime Minister from 1977 to 1979, and Indira’s son Rajiv, who served in the office in 1984-9. Still, nuclear science and technology moved ahead. The Indians bought more heavy water (from China!), tested warhead-bearing Agni and Prithvi missiles, and refused, along with Pakistan, to sign on to a significant extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995. And, with the rise of the Hindu nationalist BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) in the 1990s, nuclear weapons became even more fully associated with nationalism, however crabbed and threatening to non-Hindus, and associated as well with continuing resentment of the West and a masculine swagger characteristic of BJP leaders. When the BJP won elections in early 1998 and Atul Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister, the stage was set for a resumption of testing. As one commentator wrote, Indians bitterly recognized the West’s ‘unstated cultural assumptions: that the subcontinent is full of unstable people with deep historical resentments, incapable of acting rationally or managing a technologically sophisticated arsenal’. The BJP would prove them wrong. Three times on 11 May 1998 and twice more on the 13 th, India detonated nuclear devices—weapons, not PNEs. ‘We have a big bomb now,’ crowed Vajpayee, though the government soon withdrew that comment. India Today announced that the ‘tests and their aftermath have radically redefined India’s image of being a yogi in today’s world of realpolitik’—no one feared a gentle yogi—and a BJP official revealed a plan for party functionaries to collect ‘sacred soil’ from Pokhran and transport it in holy vessels across the country, thereby ‘spread[ing] the feeling of national self-confidence’ and radioactivity. The