But when this very human propensity to boast acquires shades of nuclear buccaneering, it's cause for goosepimply alarm. The squaring of shoulders by Indian and Pakistani scientists this week smacks of irresponsibility and a worrying indifference to the hysteria and spiralling escalation in tensions these loudly proclaimed lists of nuclear toys on the anvil can provoke. This sudden openness about nuclear plans is especially bewildering, given the fact that the evolution of India's nuclear doctrine is now under vociferous debate, that the prime minister has called for a consensus on India's stand onthe Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

If during the Kargil conflict India underlined its maturity as a forceful entrant into the nuclear club with its political and military leaders by and large eschewing the N word, this week's bragging session by its scientists paints quite another picture. The quibble here is not over the development of nuclear weapons to acquire a measure of strategic autonomy or over the age-old dictum that ``if you want peace, prepare for war'', it is over the nature of the bragging sessions. Early this week the Atomic Energy Commission chairman pronounced that Indian nuclear scientists could design and make nuclear weapons of any type or size, including the neutron bomb.

And even as Pakistani politicians cited this as an indication of India's ``expansionist designs'', one of their leading nuclear scientists countered that, why, his country too could produce the neutron bomb. Sufficient requisites for such an undertaking were already available, he added by way of proof. Sadly, thestory has not ended there. On Wednesday, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre announced its intent to test Kali-5000, a new beam weapon it is assembling.

The trouble with military buccaneering is that it can gather its own momentum and burden suspicious nations with new phantoms to shoot at. Ever since America dropped the bomb over Hiroshima 54 years ago and the Soviet Union shattered that monopoly four years later, the handful of nations that developed their own nuclear programmes to enhance their strategic interests have pondered over a foolproof way to determine the minimum deterrence needed. Once popular theories based on MAD (mutually assured destruction) and limited assured destruction may have been discarded, but nothing has quite replaced them.

Fifteen months the country went overtly nuclear, the contours of India's emerging doctrine may be disputed, but that debate itself is healthy. What is not healthy, however, is unnecessary nuclear bravado.