Until 1964, Indian leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and a bearer of the torch of nuclear disarmament on behalf of India and the non-aligned movement, had recognized the potential that India could develop nuclear weapons as a result of its nuclear power development. There were advocates of such a course in and out of the nuclear establishment. But India did not begin a bomb program even after its defeat in the 1962 India-China border war. As M.V. Ramana, a physicist who has studied India's nuclear program, has noted: "Nehru maintained that the cost and effort involved in making nuclear weapons and the hypocrisy of doing so, while asking others to give them up, did not justify the small psychological benefit of nuclear status."¹

But things changed in 1964, a watershed year in Indian politics. Nehru died in May of that year. And in October, China conducted its first nuclear test. While China's nuclear weapons program was a response to US nuclear threats and to the pullout of Soviet support in the late 1950s, the test reverberated in India, which had lost a short border war with China in 1962. The Chinese test gave India's nuclear establishment the opening it needed to successfully argue for a nuclear weapons program. Since that time, development of India's nuclear program has had the support of every government.

While its nuclear weapons program was developed in an Asian context, India has long had global political ambitions. For instance, for many years it has wanted a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. But despite the fact that it is the world's most populous democracy, it has not been able to obtain it.

The five permanent members of the Security Council are nuclear weapon states; therefore, according to the reasoning in New Delhi, obtaining global political clout was associated with one of two roads: either India would be a leader in nuclear disarmament, or it would become a nuclear weapons state. Its attempts to lead in disarmament have not met with success.

It has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since its creation in 1968, because the treaty allows the five nuclear weapon states parties to the NPT to retain nuclear weapons without a specific schedule for nuclear disarmament. The treaty, said India, was discriminatory; it created two classes of states - the nuclear "haves" and the "have-nots." But India's entreaties and initiatives never attracted support or even serious attention from the nuclear weapon states.

When France and China signed the NPT in 1992, the treaty became a more viable instrument for US nonproliferation policy. That policy has been to hold onto nuclear weapons for an indefinite period, to maintain a first-use prerogative, and to prevent the overt expansion of the number of nuclear weapon states beyond the five declared powers - with a wink (and much silence) about Israel's ambitious but clandestine nuclear arsenal.

New difficulties developed during negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in September 1996. The final treaty, the product of more than two years of negotiation, contained a provision that it could not enter into force unless India signed and ratified it, along with 43 other countries with nuclear reactors.

India was included in the 44-nation list against its express, repeated, and emphatic statements that it would never sign the CTBT unless it was accompanied by a "time-bound" commitment to complete nuclear disarmament. That this demand was unrealistic in the context of the test ban treaty did not seem to matter to India. The violation of its sovereignty by its inclusion in a treaty against its will incensed the Indian government, and helped set the stage for the May tests.

Since September 1996 there have been widespread discussions of a possible CTBT review conference in September 1999, at which parties that had ratified the treaty by then would pressure India by various means, including sanctions, to sign and ratify it.

By the time the BJP-led coalition came to power in March 1998, the Indian political scene had already shifted in favor of nuclear weapons. Because India had lost global political clout both in non-aligned forums and in the U.N. Conference on Disarmament, and because it was facing the prospect of sanctions by the turn of the century, there were few incentives not to test.

For more information on the Indian nuclear tests, see Arjun Makhijani, "A legacy lost," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,July/August, 1998; and Arjun Makhijani, "The South Asian Nuclear Crisis," Foreign Policy in Focus, newsletter of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, Vol. 3, No. 18, June, 1998. Some resources available by contacting IEER at 301-270-5500 or ieer@ieer.org.