While India welcomed the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that ended the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the superpowers, Beijing rejected it and conducted its first nuclear test in October 1964. As China gate-crashed into the nuclear club just a few months after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru passed away, India wroung its hands about exercising the nuclear option, postured about nuclear disarmament, and desperately sought an elusive ‘nuclear umbrella’ from the great powers. Meanwhile, the superpowers unveiled the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that froze the membership of the nuclear club as on January 1, 1967. China was in, India out.

Failure to test a nuclear weapon between October 1964 and January 1967 left India in a nuclear no man’s land and paid the price as a target of an expanding regime of nuclear sanctions in the following decades.

Forty years later India is on the verge of breaking out of that nuclear isolation. The UPA government boldly built on the NDA’s initiatives and signed a nuclear deal with the US in July 2005. Since then it has tied itself into knots and is now close to squandering a historic opportunity.

Failure to clinch the nuclear deal now could be as disastrous as the inability to move decisively on the nuclear front in the mid-1960s. For the nuclear regime is now being restructured, with the introduction of missile defences, a renewed worldwide interest in expanding civilian nuclear power generation, and a tightening of technology denial regime against some states. Once this new order gets frozen with India on the wrong side again, the nation will have to wait a few more decades for another opportunity to become a part of the nuclear system.

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