This collection of essays, unlike other books on this subject, emphasizes strategic, technological, and economic factors. It includes contributions from a combination of academics and governmental experts from both the United States and India. Nuclear India in the Twenty-First Century provides an important picture of India's nuclear intentions and capabilities and should facilitate policies that the US may consider in response to regional and global proliferation.

India has come a long way from being a nuclear pariah to a de facto member of the nuclear club. The transition in its nuclear identity has been accompanied by its transformation into a major economic power and underlines a pragmatic turn in its foreign-policy thinking. This book provides a historical narrative of the evolution of India’s nuclear policy since 1947, as the country continues its pursuit for complete integration into the global nuclear order. Situating India’s nuclear behaviour in this context, the book explains how India’s engagement with the atom is unique in international nuclear history and politics. Aided by declassified archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on how status, security, domestic politics, and the role of individuals have played a key role in defining and shaping India’s nuclear trajectory, policy choices, and their consequences.

On the basic philosophy of nuclear strategy with partial reference to India.

Publisher Fact Sheet The definitive history of India's long flirtation with nuclear capability, culminating in the nuclear tests that surprised the world in May 1998.

This book examines the Indian nuclear policy, doctrine, strategy and posture, clarifying the elastic concept of credible minimum deterrence at the center of the country's approach to nuclear security. This concept, Karnad demonstrates, permits the Indian nuclear forces to be beefed up, size and quality-wise, and to acquire strategic reach and clout, even as the qualifier minimum suggests an overarching concern for moderation and economical use of resources, and strengthens India's claims to be a responsible nuclear weapon state. Based on interviews with Indian political leaders, nuclear scientists, and military and civilian nuclear policy planners, it provides unique insights into the workings of India's nuclear decision-making and deterrence system. Moreover, by juxtaposing the Indian nuclear policy and thinking against the theories of nuclear war and strategic deterrence, nuclear escalation, and nuclear coercion, offers a strong theoretical grounding for the Indian approach to nuclear war and peace, nuclear deterrence and escalation, nonproliferation and disarmament, and to limited war in a nuclearized environment. It refutes the alarmist notions about a nuclear flashpoint in South Asia, etc. which derive from stereotyped analysis of India-Pakistan wars, and examines India's likely conflict scenarios involving China and, minorly, Pakistan.

The signing of the US–India civilian nuclear agreement in 2008 is a milestone in the geopolitics of the twenty-first century—one that has virtually rewritten the rules of the global nuclear order. It has also transformed the relationship between the world's oldest and largest democracies. Harsh V. Pant's book is the first detailed examination of this major policy initiative as well as the process by which this pact came to fruition. Pant identifies a range of issues at the structural, domestic, political, and individual levels that have shaped the recent trajectory of the US–India relationship. He analyses the three-year long negotiating process with a special focus on how political leaderships in both states managed domestic opposition to the pact. The author locates the agreement in the context of the broader debate over the role of international institutions in global politics.