A re we stronger as a nation with a nuclear bomb in our basement? Over fifty years ago, our message to the world, even as our people valiantly freed themselves from British yoke, was a message of quiet courage and determination epitomised in the dhoti–clad Indian who adamantly re- fused freedom if it was compromised or tainted with violence.Though our final tryst with destiny was steps removed from the Mahatma’s ideal and orgies of violence forever stained those glorious first moments of freedom, India still tried to move ahead with a staunch espousal of a non–aligned world, free of weapons of mass destruction such as those that had been callously hurled at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, wedded also to the development and prosperity of third world nations.

Together with Yugoslavia’s Tito and Egypt’s Nasser, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had then stood tall in this commitment before the world. Today, in place of our firm commitment to global peace and disarmament, India has made a crude bid to ape the strategy of some in the West with none of the latter’s monetary muscle. Was this show of strength necessary for national security, national morale or for international standing? Has India’s image abroad received a dramatic face–lift after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s cowboyish posturing at Pokharan on May 11?

Our desire to go nuclear, and through this act to attempt to join the world’s nuclear club, would suggest that the five countries that enjoy this exclusive membership also enjoy a corresponding world stature and status of the kind that has ‘evaded’ non–nuclear western states like Germany or Asia’s Japan. The truth, in fact, is to the contrary, with the exception, of course, of the omnipresent USA.

In a country still plagued with abysmal poverty and low literacy, the pro–bomb hysteria may replace the latest ad jingles and dominate conversations in Delhi and Mumbai’s pubs, discos and water amusement parks. But to know whether all this finds an echo in the hearts of the real India, our pollsters would need to move out of the metros and travel to the arid farmlands of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra where farmers have been committing suicide this year fearful of yet another bad crop. Or go to Orissa where over 1,800 people, obviously living way below the standards that any notions of human decency would demand, have died because this summer temperatures crept upwards of 46 degrees Celsius.

The real tragedy is that with a handful of its leaders opting for the bomb, millions of Indians will have to pay for its costs. This means that quite apart from the 14 per cent increase in defence expenditure over last year’s revised budget estimates, the very logic of taking the nuclear option is that it is unlikely that the problems of grinding poverty, drought, famine, or the lack of primary schools across the country will be seriously addressed. Simply because there is going to be not money to pay for all these. But, at least, the land of the Mahatma can boast of a bomb.

Overtaken by these developments, we decided to devote this month’s issue to looking at the manifold implications of going nuclear. Praful Bidwai’s lead articles on the horrors of a nuclear arms race and the crippling economic costs of the nuclear option are accompanied by articles from two dissenting Pakistani scientists, Zia Mian and Pervez Hoodbhoy. In addition, we publish the candid admission by a former chief of the Indian navy, Admiral Ramdas, who after feeling "happy and proud" on May 11 1998 went through a "manthan". He now wants "this madness to stop."