For over 2 hrs, scientists tried to persuade me to go in for nuclear test, I said no: Deve Gowda

“The issue (going in for a follow-up to the 1974 Pokharan test) came up before me sometime at the end of January or early February of 1997. Certain leading scientists, officials (he mentioned no names) came to me and tried to persuade me for two and a half hours on going in for a nuclear test,” Deve Gowda told The Financial Express. “But my answer was no,” he said.

“The primary reason not to conduct another nuclear test was not the fear of American sanctions but because I didn’t want relations in the sub-continent to be spoilt. We wanted to improve our relations with our neighbours,” Deve Gowda said.

He added that by then, dates had been fixed for holding bilateral talks with Pakistan and he did not want anything to disrupt the process.

Incidentally, it was two years earlier, in the winter of 1995, when P V Narasimha Rao was PM that there was also talk of a nuclear test. Whether the US found out and put pressure against testing or whether Rao had no real plan to test has been the subject of much speculation, most recently last August, when Jaswant Singh claimed there was a “mole” in the Rao PMO who tipped off Washington.

“There was so much euphoria (after the nuclear tests) for a week. But after Pakistan also conducted nuclear tests, both the countries came to equal status...after the decision was taken, Jagmohan made a speech in Parliament saying that all the ‘previous Prime Ministers were impotents’. I intervened and told him to take all the credit for himself and I don’t want to reveal what steps we had taken,” Deve Gowda said.

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