What Makes The Indian Bomb Tick?

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the history of India’ nuclear-weapons development program and the central factors that shaped it. The history is divided into four somewhat distinct phases, with the third culminating in the nuclear tests of May 1998. The chapter then chronicles unusually dramatic events of the fourth phase, beginning in 1999—the Lahore summit; the Kargil War; the draft nuclear doctrine. The chapter suggests that these events indicated some of the difficulties India would have adjusting to the benefits and liabilities of overtly possessing nuclear weapons. The chapter concludes by noting that after a fifty-year epoch, in which India took a singular approach to nuclear weapons, Indian strategists and officials are now on a slippery slope toward convergence with the dominant, realpolitik conception and management of nuclear weapons, which India always had derided as irrational, immoral, and excessively dangerous.