INDIA'S NUCLEAR SECURITY Edited By Raju G.C. Thomas and Amit Gupta Sage, Rs 595 May 1998 was indeed a turning point for south Asia. The summer heat in the sandy deserts of Rajasthan increased even further when India conducted five tests at Pokhran. In response, Pakistan also carried out a series of nuclear blasts at Chagai in Baluchistan. Why did India and Pakistan go for the nuclear tests? The book under review attempts to answer this question. This collection of 13 essays by American and Indian political scientists eschews the 'strategic culture' approach, which assumes that cultural norms and religious ideology shape the defence strategy of a nation. In contrast, the essays of the volume could be categorized under the 'realpolitik' approach, which asserts that power politics is the key determinant of a country's nuclear policy. The essayists belong to Hans Norgenthau's 'power-game school'', which claims that in the international arena, polities seek power for their own sake. It is the hunger for political status and not economic factors (as the classical Marxists would make us believe), that is the principal imperative in shaping the contours of a country's national security programme. This comes out clearly from Farah Zarah's article. Pakistan's decision to explode nuclear bombs was a reactive attempt to respond to India's nuclear superiority. The decision to go nuclear was not taken by the country's military behind closed doors. Enraged by India's superior status as a nuclear power, it was the Pakistani public which exerted pressure on it leaders and compelled them to develop the bomb. What could possibly have prodded India to conduct the nuclear tests in the late Nineties? Sunit Ganguly, professor of political science at the University of New York, writes that in 1995, the Congress government was prepared to carry out nuclear tests. However, American satellites caught the Indians red handed and forced P.V. Narasimha Rao to abandon his plans. Rao's initial decision to proceed with the nuclear programme was the culmination of attempts by successive Indian governments from 1990 onwards to accelerate research on nuclear technology. Stephen Cohen and Mohammed Ayub discuss the factors that were responsible for altering the pace of nuclear research in India during the last decade of the 20th century. Following the Baudelian framework, Cohen classifies the causative factors into three levels: long term determinants, intermediate mid-term factors and short-term variables. In Cohen's analysis, the medium term variable proved to be crucial in India's case. In the Eighties, India reigned supreme in south Asia. With China being deterred by the Soviet Union and Pakistan maintaining a low profile, this favourable environment resulted in the promulgation of the Indira doctrine, which was an Indianized version of the Monroe doctrine. The core message was that no Western power should be allowed to intervene in south Asia, and if any country required aid against external or internal enemies, then it should turn to India. However, the Nineties brought about a change in this scenario. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that China was free to focus its attention on India. The United States, which was now the world's only superpower, began paying greater attention to Beijing rather than to New Delhi. To make matters worse, the mid-Nineties witnessed the emergence of Sino-Pakistani cooperation in the military field. According to Cohen, a desperate India decided to counter this by going nuclear. Once the bombs are produced, delivery vehicles are required. Dinshaw Mistry shows how India's ballistic missile programme derives technical knowhow from India's space programme. The manufacture and launching of the Agni and the Prithvi missiles has been possible only because of the Indian Space Research Organization's successful launching of weather satellites. Clausewlitz's watertight compartmentalization of peace and war preparation is no longer applicable in the present world. The neo-realist contributors of this admirable book provide a summary of south Asia's nuclear programme and examines its achievements. Despite the destruction that they can cause, nukes are a necessary evil. Instead of code-naming the successful Pokhran blasts as 'Buddha Smiling', it would have been more apt for New Delhi to name them as 'Devil Grinning'.