Dead on Arrival
Testing Times: The Global Stake in a Nuclear Test Ban
by Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik
Dag Hammarskjold Foundation
Uppsala, Sweden, 1996
71 pages, ISBN 91-85214-23-X
India might find ego-gratification by emerging as a nuclear power, but it will have to contend with the image of 'rogue' state.
The end of the cold war brightened hopes for the emergence of a nuclear weapons-free world. But the presence of some 20,000 nuclear warheads and their sophisticated delivery systems with the nuclear weapons states (NWS) on the one hand, and the activities of the threshold nuclear powers on the other, have ensured that it remains a difficult proposition. The initialling of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by the end of this year was supposed to have been an important step in this direction.