Of course, India made history on May 11-13 in the year 1998, when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government conducted the nuclear tests, popularly known as Pokhran-2.
Creditably for Atal Bihari Vajpayee and people like Dr APJ Abdul Kalam and R Chidambaram – the top scientists involved in the highly important assignment – the Pokhran-2 was achieved in “less than two months of the Vajpayee Government taking office” for the second time. The exercise could ensure that the American spy system “did not even smell it” before the country actually conducted the tests and Atal Bihari Vajpayee had announced the same.
I still remember the afternoon. Suddenly a press conference was convened. Those were the days of unstable polity and coalition regimes; BJP’s ally AIADMK led by Jayalalitha, was persisting with unreasonable demands and pressures. So when the media conference was convened, we in a leading news agency office were actually speculating on whether Atal Bihari Vajpayee would finally resign.
Thus the development was anti-climax, and it left the world shell-shocked.
Credit must be given to the then Defence Minister George Fernandes, who otherwise for long was against any nuclearisation programme.
In the mid-1990s, P V Narasimha Rao had ordered conducting the tests, but the programme was abandoned at the pressure of the Americans. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s trusted aide and ministerial colleague Jaswant Singh later said, “It is reasonable to conclude that Narasimha Rao had ordered nuclear tests in 1995. Satellite imagery, and some even suggest human intelligence from India, revealed the plans to the US Government, which then was made public and the premier Rao backed off”.
Jaswant Singh and others in the know of things like K Subrahmanyam (father of present External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar) had argued emphatically that India was “left with no option” but to go for
covert nuclear weaponisation.
Jaswant Singh even said, “The Sino-Pakistan nuclear collaboration continued in violation of the NPT and it was obvious that the NPT regime in India’s neighbourhood had collapsed”. Moreover, Pakistan was getting Chinese assistance in setting up a plutonium production reactor at Khushab.
The nuclear journey of India is also punctuated with stories of failure of political leadership, especially between 1987 and 1998. In fact, Gen K Sundarji, former army chief, had penned a novel, ‘The Blind Men of
Hindustan’ virtually poured out, ventilating the frustration of the military chiefs for keeping the country and the forces unprepared.
In fact, on the other hand, Pakistani leaders, including Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, kept on using the Nuke card and tried to blackmail India. Nawaz Sharif said in 1994 that Pakistan could even use nuclear weapons against any Indian attempt to seize Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Prior to that, Benazir Bhutto 1992, in an interview with NBC, said that ‘bombs were assembled’ behind her back by the Pakistan army when she was the Prime Minister.
K Subrahmanyam later said – “The same Benazir Bhutton vehemently denied Rajiv Gandhi’s suggestion during his visit to Pakistan in 1988 that she was not in charge of the nuclear weapon programme and the army”.
Now look into other areas. In May 1998, when the Vajpayee Government conducted the tests, China possessed 450 nuked warheads, the US had 12,070, Russia – 22,500, France – 500 and the UK- 300.
Now, we need to have a closer look at certain facts of history.
Though India attained the potential to develop nuclear weapons after the first nuclear explosion at Pokhran in 1974, India steadfastly refrained from exercising its nuclear option. Instead, the policy of New Delhi was to choose to work for nuclear disarmament, notwithstanding deteriorating security situations.
In the 1970s, Prime Minister Morarji Desai had said in an interview with Barbara Walters of American Broadcasting Company (ABC) that he would never go in for nuclear weapons.
India later opted to develop only a credible “minimum” nuclear deterrent due to the widespread recognition that nuclear weapons globally had soon turned into ‘political weapons’ and not weapons of
warfighting.
In the end, of course, we may conclude that India’s nuclear policies and the preparations for tests had not developed in a vacuum. Experts later had reasons to say that the Nuke-journey was essentially a “graduated and measured” response to international happenings.
There were a few interesting episodes, and they are worth mentioning. Ukraine, which is in the news for war with Russia, had come under enormous pressure, and even reportedly, financial incentives were offered to force it to give up its nuclear weapons capacities.
On the other hand, even South Africa had planned nuke tests, but as Nelson Mandela assumed office in 1994 as a black-majority Government, the pressure to give up its programmes intensified.
Finally, what ends well is ‘well’ for everyone.
The then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee said that there was no need to cover the nuclear explosions “with a veil of secrecy… India now is a nuclear weapons state.”
On May 27, 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee told Parliament in a suo motu Statement: “We do not intend to use these (nuclear) weapons for aggression or for mounting threats against any country; these are weapons of self-defence, to ensure that India is not subjected to nuclear threats or coercion. We do not intend to engage in an arms race.”
We may add, in the end, that on May 29, 1998, Pakistan also conducted nuclear tests at Chagai.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee then offered to discuss a no-first-use agreement with Pakistan and other countries, bilaterally or in a multilateral forum.
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