Producing Insecurity

It is now a little over 20 years since former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced, on the afternoon of 11 May 1998, that three nuclear devices had been exploded earlier that day. A couple of days later, after two more explosions, Vajpayee despatched a letter to the United States (US) President Bill Clinton putting forward the following rationale for conducting the tests:

I have been deeply concerned at the deteriorating security environment, especially the nuclear environment, faced by India for some years past. We have an overt nuclear weapons state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem. To add to that distrust that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state. At the hands of this bitter neighbour we have suffered three aggressions in the last 50 years.