Two separate and interconnected reasons led to Indira Gandhi’s resolve to conduct the test although its roots really went back to her father, Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. It is difficult to think of another person so thoroughly opposed to nuclear weapons as he. Yet all through his life — since 1946 indeed — he also held steadfastly to the policy that India must develop the technology to build these weapons, should the need arise, especially if others refused to abjure them. (With the solitary exception of Morarji Desai in 1977, all Nehru’s successors have broadly shared this approach.).

Against this backdrop, the first reason for Pokhran-I burst into the open within five months of Nehru’s death. On October 16, 1964 China’s first nuclear bomb went up at Lop Nor. Coincidentally, Nikita Khrushchev, who had denied China a nuclear weapon design, went down in Moscow on the same day. In New Delhi, K. Subrahmanyam, the country’s premier security analyst, then a deputy secretary in the defence ministry, sent a top-secret note to the defence secretary suggesting that a committee, headed by the legendary Homi Bhabha, should devise India’s response to the Chinese challenge. In the ministry of external affairs, K. R. Narayanan, then director, China (later President) also advised the government to “exercise the nuclear option”. If a personal note is permissible, a week ahead of them, in The Statesman (October 9) I had pleaded for an Indian nuclear weapons programme because the “mushroom cloud was about to appear on the Himalayas.”

... contd.