Perkovich’s purpose is to answer three questions: Why did India develop nuclear weapons when it did and the way that it did? Why did India resist external pressure to stop or reverse the program? What effect did the United States have on India’s nuclear program? He answers these questions persuasively. For the past half century, the most influential and predominant theory of state behavior in the international realm has been realism, which argues the proposition that the international system is anarchic because it lacks a central authority capable of providing security. In addition, the states that occupy international space must provide for their own when they can and in alliance with others when they must. While security is not the only concern of the state, it is a need common to all, and when security is at stake, it will dominate all other concerns.

The logic of realism would lead to the conclusion that if a state’s neighbors had nuclear weapons, the most threatening of all weapons known to man, the state would have no choice but to acquire such weapons as well. By this reasoning, India should have gone nuclear in the 1960s after China conducted its test in 1964, or at any other time between then and 1998, which related not only to China but also to Pakistan. But India did not, and the explanation why it failed to is a central aspect of Perkovich’s study.

Realism has no theory of domestic politics. It has been long evident that domestic considerations affect national security decisions in the nuclear and in other security-related arenas. Yet Perkovich’s study brings home more explicitly than any previous study how domestic factors can affect policy on nuclear weapons and proliferation. It is tempting to argue that India is an exception to the general rule. The complexity of the Indian case, derived from psychocultural, moralistic, historical, and other considerations, may make it a more extreme example of how domestic factors can affect the nuclear decisionmaking process, but it is not a stand-alone case.

Perkovich did not undertake his study to debunk realism and the role of security concerns in bringing India to a nuclear power position, but to examine analytically the evolution of its program. Two elements catalyzed India’s nuclear program. The first was an underlying and unrequited political desire to transcend its colonial past, with a passion for recognition as the world’s largest democracy, a state in the front ranks of the international community with all the status and respect that it entails. The second was the steady drive of a scientific and technological nuclear elite (described as a strategic enclave) who were anxious to demonstrate that they were no less capable than their counterparts in the West to master the challenges of the atom. Nevertheless, several Indian prime ministers were constrained by narrative and economic concerns in reaching for the nuclear sword, even while allowing development work to continue.

Eventually, a convergence of external and internal events brought about change. Externally, the decision in 1995 of more than 175 state parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to extend the treaty’s life indefinitely was a setback for India. Without an unqualified commitment by the nuclear weapons states to proceed with nuclear disarmament (for which India desperately lobbied from the outside), the extension moved India further away from the political mainstream on nonproliferation. The subsequent negotiation of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)—whereby India unsuccessfully sought explicit linkage to eliminate all nuclear weapons but found the treaty’s entry into force provision dependent upon, among other things, India’s participation—enforced that point even more. At the same time, this action threatened to hinder implementing a decision to exercise the nuclear option and to verify the operational viability of its weapon designs. National security considerations raised by continued Chinese assistance to Pakistan in the nuclear and missile fields also took their toll on India’s forbearance.

Internally, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to political power, with its disposition to set nuclear ambiguity aside and decisively reject what has been termed “nuclear apartheid,” conjoined with the persistence of the “strategic enclave” to move India squarely into the nuclear camp. (Apparently the BJP did this without having ever seriously considered what happens next strategically, militarily, or politically, without any significant discussion or debate over what exercising the nuclear option might mean to India in the larger strategic context.)

To answer the question about the effect of the United States on India’s nuclear program, Perkovich reveals the uneven course of American nuclear diplomacy vis-à-vis India. He begins with the aftermath of China’s nuclear test in 1964, exploring the possibility (never pursued) of a nuclear sharing arrangement with India, which involved U.S. weapons under U.S. control. The weapons were to be turned over to India only in the event of war or a major crisis involving China (thought of in terms of an alternative to India’s acquiring independent nuclear capability). A decade later, following India’s nuclear test in 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sought to focus on improving relations with India by downplaying efforts to secure its accession to NPT while also urging tight export controls on anything that could contribute to proliferation elsewhere.

This initiative was quickly offset by the nuclear supplier group effort to put constraints on transfers that could contribute to proliferation. In addition, congressional involvement in nonproliferation policy, initiated by the amendments of Senators John Glenn and William Stuart Symington, aimed at curtailing transfer or acquisition of enrichment or reprocessing equipment, material, or technology by suspending military and economic assistance to countries involved in such transactions. The even more far-reaching Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 further offset the initiative. These events initiated a more focused effort to encourage India to join the NPT as a nonnuclear weapons state. The effort also encouraged India’s first steps to cap its nuclear weapons activities and then reverse them—without the United States redefining its relationship with India in political terms and then abandoning it on the back side of Washington’s diplomatic globe. For India, especially since the end of the Cold War, the United States seemed to have displaced the United Kingdom as the personification of colonialism it detests. Colonial resentment has been transferred from London to Washington, to which India looks for respect, acknowledgment, and treatment as a first-rank power.

If, as Perkovich says, nonproliferation is linked to disarmament in a serious way, as I believe it is, it is also the case that disarmament is linked to the general political and security environment. This means that it is a collective challenge and requires collective commitment and collective responsibility if we are to succeed in moving beyond the nuclear age. This does not negate nuclear disarmament without general and complete disarmament (whatever that means), but that nuclear disarmament will not occur. Unless the nonproliferation regime is strong, resilient, and universal, the greatest illusion of all would be for India or others to think that they can write the script and view the performance of the rest of the world on the stage. Meanwhile, they sit back and observe, contemplating when in the future they will become a constructive partner.