"You bastards. You finally did it. You blew it up. Damn you all to hell."
--Colonel George Taylor, in Planet of the Apes

Most adult Indians will never forget where they were, what they were doing and how they reacted to the news, on May 11, of the nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert. I was 4,700 km from ground zero, watching the Reuters wires in an office in Hong Kong. And my first reactions were shock and dismay.

Indians of my generation were taught that the Bomb was an instrument of evil; in school, our history books carried cautionary pictures of the charred ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. India's own nuclear test in 1974, our teachers said, was strictly a one-off: we showed the world we could do it, but then we took the high road by choosing not to make the weapons. In the 1970s and '80s, tests by the Americans, Soviets, French, British and Chinese invariably evoked cluck-clucking from our parents, angry denunciations from our politicians and finger-wagging editorials in our newspapers.

In other words, nothing and nobody had prepared us for May 11.

As I digested the news, colleagues--Americans, Canadians, Malaysians, Hong Kong Chinese--were coming by my cubicle, all looking simultaneously grave and sympathetic, the way you approach a neighbor whose teenage son has just been expelled from school. Oh you poor thing, they seemed to say, look what your country's done. But, as they would for that neighbor, expressions of pity (even if unintended) only made matters worse: I took these as a challenge. My best response, I reasoned, was patriotic bravado. I would stand by my country and defend its actions to the last.

PAGE 1  |  2