Pokhran and Beyond: India's Nuclear Behaviour. By Ashok Kapur. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 288p. $35.00

Extract

Several years ago during a meeting at the United States Department of Defense on the implications of national missile defense plans, I and a few collaborators asked U.S. officials how they anticipated that India would react. The initial answer was that they had not given it any serious thought, since their main focus was managing Russian concerns about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Ashok Kapur would not be surprised by this anecdote. In Pokhran and Beyond he argues forcefully that key among a number of variables explaining India's nuclear behavior was the sense that countries, particularly the United States and China, “did not take Indian security concerns seriously, and [that] Indian pleas for a strategic dialogue [went] unheeded” (p. 7).