It was just another Monday evening in Bangalore when my newly acquired mobile phone sprang to life and my boss in Delhi at the other end could not hide what sounded like a mixture of excitement and disbelief. “They have conducted nuclear tests!” he said. “Do you know if Raja Ramanna is in Bangalore? Can you talk to him? Ask him what he thinks.”

Ramanna, 73 then, was the father of Pokharan I and also sometimes referred to as the bombmeister, and an outspoken one at that. As my reporter’s luck would have it, he was indeed in town, and as I later realised, I was fortunate to get through to him in just one attempt.

“The phone has just not stopped ringing all evening,” he said, as he opened the door to his RT Nagar bungalow and rushed inside to answer another call. The living room was dimly lit and somewhere in the distance, a stereo was playing Mozart or Beethoven. “I was about to open a bottle of red wine to celebrate. Will you have a glass?” he asked.

“These tests are only ornamentations but necessary in the modern world,” he said, sounding ebullient as he settled down with his glass. Uncharacteristic remarks, I thought, coming from a firm believer in the power of nuclear weapons and the benefits of nuclear energy. “They can’t kick us around, especially Pakistan... the way they talk about us all the time.”

What followed was a two-hour lecture, frequently interrupted by the phone, on India’s nuclear programme, the politics of weaponisation and the indignation at having to fight the sanctions imposed after Pokharan I as director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, among others.

... contd.