On the morning of May 18, 1974, at 8:05 sharp, some 110 kilometres from Jaisalmer in Rajasthan’s Thar desert, the push of a button announced India’s entry into the closed club of nuclear nations.
The reverberations of that test, conducted underground in arid Pokhran, and called Pokhran-I (codename Smiling Buddha), were felt around the world. With this detonation, India had become the only country outside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the P5, namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China – to have conducted a confirmed nuclear weapons test. China had tested its first just 10 years ago, in 1964, two years after the Indo-China war.
India termed it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”, but it was in effect a decisive and unequivocal declaration that it had nuclear capability. The country’s nuclear journey gained pace in the late 1950s under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru through Project Phoenix. It was mainly to promote civilian nuclear energy, but with physicists like Homi Bhabha, the “father of the Indian nuclear programme”, laying the groundwork for weapons development. The Atomic Energy Act of 1962 gave further control to the central government over atomic energy resources. After Nehru died in 1964, the efforts shifted mostly towards peaceful goals under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Gandhian scientist Vikram Sarabhai.
However, with Shastri’s successor, Indira Gandhi, the momentum towards weaponisation resumed. A small, secret team of scientists and engineers worked through the 1960s and early 1970s to build the necessary infrastructure and technical capabilities. The 1971 Indo-Pak war, during which the US sent warships to the Bay of Bengal, further galvanised India’s resolve, culminating in Gandhi authorising the development of a nuclear test device in 1972. India had already opposed joining the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it saw as discriminatory. In later years, while it participated in negotiations for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), it did not ratify it for the same reasons.
Pokhran-I invited strong, sharp reactions from the world. India faced immediate sanctions. Major nuclear suppliers shut their doors to it. Less than a year later, led by the US, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was formed to restrict and regulate the supply of nuclear material and know-how to countries that hadn’t ratified the NPT. The US further tightened export controls by passing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, 1978.
An editorial in The New York Times read: “Such great talent of resources has been squandered on the vanity of power, while 600 million Indians slip deeper into poverty. The sixth member of the nuclear club may be passing the beggar bowl before the year is out.”
India continued with its programme through the ’80s and ’90s, aware that neighbouring Pakistan was also acquiring nuclear capability. Meanwhile, the original five nuclear weapons states kept a close eye on India, which had by now opened its economy to the world.
Twenty-four years after Smiling Buddha, the hot, barren Pokhran would once again witness a country’s determination to exercise its sovereign right to security, despite the intense scrutiny and the threat of sanctions. It was again in the month of May, when average temperatures in Pokhran hover above 40 degrees Celsius, that India conducted its second test – a series of five nuclear tests, actually; three on May 11 and two on May 13, 1998.
Pokhran-II, codenamed Operation Shakti, with the devices named Shakti-I through Shakti-V, carried out under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, also invited intense criticism from the global community. Besides the Western world, countries in the
Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Malaysia also reacted adversely. While India stood its ground, it made known its “no-first-use” policy.
India’s record since has established it as a nuclear-responsible country. In 2008, it signed a civil nuclear agreement with the US, and the same year, it received a waiver from the NSG. It has since signed civil nuclear cooperation agreements with Japan, Australia, South Korea, France and Vietnam, among other countries.
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 "Smiling buddha to Operation Shakti")