Nuclear crises don’t usually come as complete surprises. Nations hungry to acquire the power of mass death will steal and cheat and lie to achieve their ambition, but millions are spent on high-tech spying to divine the telltale signs well before any nuclear adventurism occurs. Not this time. Before firing off five nuclear explosions last week, India deliberately concealed its specific test plans and misled the rest of the world. But no one was paying attention anyway, even when the signs of India’s intentions were there to be read. The shock runs up our spine because it happened when the age of nuclear terror seemed over. Now the specter is back. Which country will show off its atomic prowess next? Pakistan is certainly tempted. Is another frightening, nation-wrecking arms race brewing? Will we ever devise effective ways to control the nuclear beast? The story of how India revived the nuclear nightmare begins in December 1995. The government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao is secretly readying an underground nuclear test when U.S. spy satellites orbiting over the Thar Desert in Rajasthan near the Pakistani border snap pictures of thick electric cables being installed in a hole at the Pokhran test site. The Clinton Administration leaks word of the preparations to the press, then dispatches a diplomatic team to confront the Indian government with the satellite photos. Rao is forced to abort the test. But India’s atomic scientists also go to school on the evidence Washington has presented. Over the next three years, they begin masking their activities at Pokhran, keeping up a steady flow of operations, moving trucks in and out, lulling the U.S. into thinking the bomb team is just puttering around. In May 1996 the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party comes to power, and the first thing Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee plans to do is carry out that canceled nuclear test. The B.J.P. has made nuclear assertion a cardinal plank of its India-first platform, and Vajpayee gives the go-ahead, but scientists tell him it will take a month. Before they can carry through, his government falls, after just 13 days in office. Two years later Vajpayee, 71, returns as Prime Minister. This time he rules in a coalition made up of fractious and contrary parties, 17 in all, that disagree on almost every issue except one: it is time to declare India a full nuclear power, not just an ambiguous “threshold” state. After demonstrating its manifest capability to build A-bombs in 1974, India has voluntarily practiced a form of nuclear “Don’t ask, don’t tell” for more than two decades. Vajpayee is determined to accomplish what nine previous governments have not dared since India detonated its first nuclear device under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. “You needed a bold Prime Minister to take the decision,” says Vajpayee aide Pramod Mahajan. Vajpayee takes it, just a week after assuming leadership on March 19, bringing into his confidence only two Cabinet members. A quick internal study concludes that India would suffer manageable pain as a result of international economic penalties. Vajpayee picks an auspicious date for the test: May 11, the same Buddhist holiday when the 1974 nuclear test went off.
