India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation Updated Edition with a New Afterword

In May 1998, India shocked the world--and many of its own citizens--by detonating five nuclear weapons in the Rajasthan desert. Why did India bid for nuclear weapon status at a time when 149 nations had signed a ban on nuclear testing? What drove India's new Hindu nationalist government to depart from decades of nuclear restraint, a control that no other nation with similar capacities had displayed? How has U.S. nonproliferation policy affected India's decision making?
India's Nuclear Bomb is the definitive, comprehensive history of how the world's largest democracy, has grappled with the twin desires to have and to renounce the bomb. Each chapter contains significant historical revelations drawn from scores of interviews with India's key scientists, military leaders, diplomats and politicians, and from declassified U.S. government documents and interviews with U.S. officials. Perkovich teases out the cultural and ethical concerns and vestiges of colonialism that underlie India's seemingly paradoxical stance.
India's nuclear history challenges leading theories of why nations pursue and hang onto nuclear weapons, raising important questions for international relations theory and security studies. So, too, the blasts in Rajasthan have shaken the foundations of the international nonproliferation system. With the end of the Cold War and an even more chaotic international scene, Perkovich's analysis of an alternative model is timely, sobering, and vital.

Nobody expected India--the country that produced pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi--to go nuclear so soon or so suddenly. But that's what it did in May 1998, detonating five nuclear weapons, to the world's astonishment. George Perkovich offers a comprehensive survey of how India got the bomb, starting with early technical efforts dating back 50 years and concluding with a full treatment of exactly what India did in the Rajasthan desert and why. He challenges the conventional wisdom holding that countries pursue nuclear power mainly for security reasons. Perkovich says the motives, at least in India's case (and, he believes, in the case of other developing countries), were much more complex. An overwhelming desire for global recognition and national pride trumped everything else. He suggests the United States might have done more to head off recent events had the nation not lacked a coherent policy toward South Asia thanks to cold-war politics. India's rivalry with Pakistan didn't help, either; it's extremely difficult to be on very good terms with both nations at once. The footnotes are extensive and the details sometimes can seem overwhelming, but the book's topic may be one of the most important issues of the 21st century. In short, George Perkovich and India's Nuclear Bomb are to India what Richard Rhodes and The Making of the Atomic Bomb are to the United States. --John J. Miller