India's nuclear weapon test explosions have rocked Washington as few other events have in recent years. Among senior officials, there is a palpable sense of outrage at having been deceived by the new BJP-led government. "We were told privately and publicly that India would continue to show restraint in the non-proliferation field, and would do nothing to surprise us," Assistant Secretary for South Asian Affairs Rick Inderfurth told a Senate committee on May 13.

The very officials who only a few days ago were laboring diligently on the Clinton's administration's initiative to end India's civil nuclear isolation, through increased science and technology cooperation, trade and investment, will now turn their attention to implementing harsh economic sanctions far broader in scope than the specialized nuclear and "dual-use" technology controls that ostensibly were the focus of Indian complaints. A more vivid example of the old adage, "from the frying pan into the fire," can scarcely be imagined. And for what? Why has the new Indian government leapt so precipitously into the fires of international disrepute? What does it think it will find there? An increased margin of domestic public support for its razor thin coalition? An increased margin of national security?

If it is the former, such rampant domestic political opportunism at the expense of the international community comes at a steep price, and is unlikely to balance out in the long run. India has gone down this road before. When she ordered preparations for the Pokharan test in early 1973 , Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was in a political downward spiral that culminated in the State of Emergency and the suspension of Indian democracy. While it was widely hailed within India at the time, the May 1974 test was hardly the act of a confident and capable government that knew what it wanted from the development of nuclear weapons. Despite all the hoopla, a nuclear deterrent force never materialized, and very little was learned from the test that could not have been established by well diagnosed non-nuclear experiments and calculations. However, India's civil nuclear sector and associated technical areas have paid dearly over the years for that little demonstration of nuclear scientific hubris and political desperation.

This time around, it is still by no means clear that India now knows what it wants to achieve with nuclear weapons, or how it is going to get there. But the world in the meantime has changed a great deal The idea that a more convincing demonstration of India's nuclear weapon capabilities will somehow boost India's international standing is so out of step with the times that it could almost be considered quaint if it were not also so damaging to the very cause of disarmament that India professes to support. The Cold War ideological rivalries that spawned the nuclear arms race are gone, nuclear arsenals are in steep decline, and something of a global consensus has emerged that the interests of international security are best served by halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons while reducing existing arsenals and building the international norms and institutions that can eventually displace the role of nuclear deterrence in the international system.

While American policymakers have long understood that India does not accept this framework for coping with the nuclear danger, the Clinton Administration thought it was working towards a new understanding with India. The diplomatic treatment of India as a kind of renegade "hold-out" from the NPT would be dropped, India's existing non-deployed "nuclear option" would tacitly be accommodated -- and U.S. technology controls adjusted accordingly -- if India expressed its support for the emerging global norm of nonproliferation in other ways, such as joining the CTBT, supporting the conclusion of a global ban on the production of fissile materials for weapons, and expanding the number of Indian nuclear facilities under international safeguards. India's stealthy preparation and conduct of the recent test series has wiped out what was to have been a cooperative effort at mutual accommodation, and it has sowed seeds of distrust that may continue to sprout for years to come.

The Clinton Administration is responding with stiff sanctions because under U.S. law it has little choice in the matter; because it feels that the credibility of the entire U.S. nonproliferation effort is at risk if India's nuclear explosions are not met with a strong response; and because the Indian government's public and private statements to date have offered little guidance on where India is headed, and what kind of limitations on its nuclear capabilities India is prepared to accept.

The public statements purporting to explain the Indian government's strategic rationale for conducting the tests are widely viewed, both inside and outside the U.S. government, as not credible. For example, in his letter to President Clinton, the Prime Minister cites an "atmosphere of distrust" stemming from the 1962 border conflict with China, as a symptom of a "deteriorating" Indian security environment that needed shoring-up with a demonstration of India's nuclear weapon prowess.

One wonders how credible an American President would be explaining after the fact to the Indian Prime Minister that the United States had resumed nuclear testing because of residual tensions with Russia stemming from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis! There would, at the very least, be serious doubts about his fitness for governing. Yet otherwise sane and sober Indian intellectuals and diplomats will suddenly bend your ear about the terrible humiliations inflicted on India by China in 1962. However, nuclear weapons played no role in this now ancient confrontation, and both China and the world have changed a great deal, but not, apparently, India.

Moreover, at least with reference to China, how can one reasonably infer that that the nuclear security environment is "deteriorating" when China has stopped testing, signed the CTBT, capped the growth of its nuclear arsenal at under 500 weapons, joined the NPT, and -- the Defense Minister's ill-informed pronouncements notwithstanding -- undertaken no tactical or theater nuclear deployments that can plausibly be interpreted as directed at the Indian subcontinent.

As for the nuclear threat from Pakistan, exactly how does detonating five nuclear explosives control, reduce, or in any way mitigate this threat? Think about it. Pakistan does not pose a conventionally superior military threat to India, so Indian nuclear weapons are not "needed" for this purpose. And it is absurd to think that Pakistani leaders must be actively "deterred" from deliberately launching a "bolt out of the blue" nuclear attack for the unprovoked and purely genocidal purpose of killing millions of Indians, including millions of fellow Muslims.

So one is left thinking that India's leaders have been seduced by the now discredited mythology that nuclear weapons will somehow confer useable leverage in resolving peripheral crises and confrontations involving the conventional forces of a nuclear armed opponent. But this is a risky and potentially very dangerous illusion. Many such crises are sufficiently peripheral to national survival that nuclear threats are neither credible nor morally admissable, and usually both. Such was the U.S. experience in Vietnam and the Russian experience in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons could not be used, either on the battlefield or strategically, to dissuade one side or the other from continuing the conflict. Nuclear deterrence in this case merely ensures the opportunity for a long and bloody conventional "proxy war."

But what of those confrontations, such as the Cuban missile crisis, or a future Indian border confrontation with China, where perceptions of core national interests may bring well nuclear weapons into play? This is inherently a very dangerous, high stakes game in which the ultimate risks to the civilian populations of both players are wholly incommensurate with the "national interests" actually at stake.

Today the Cuban missile crisis is widely acknowledged as involving supremely irresponsible risk-taking by both national leaderships. Without either leadership actually willing it, the crisis could well have culminated in inadvertant nuclear war. Reducing but by no means eliminating this risk -- through robust nuclear command and control systems, survivable basing, and nuclear options short of immediate Armageddon -- while still seeking the deterrent benefit of nuclear weapons in conventional military confrontations with another nuclear weapon state, requires the expenditure of billions of dollars. Is India really prepared to go down this road? If not, India may wind up with the worst of both worlds -- a nuclear "deterrent" that emboldens and then ensnares the national leadership in crisis situations, but ultimately provokes rather than deters nuclear attack.

India's arms control thinking appears equally cloudy. While not diminishing significantly the international opposition to the tests, it would have been far preferable for the Indian government to have announced at the outset its intention to sign the CTBT at the conclusion of the test series, as both France and China did when they conducted a widely condemned test series during the final year of the test ban negotiations. By these actions they simultaneously assured the international community that they were not out to sabotage the CTBT, and that their nuclear ambitions were tightly circumscribed and intended to adapt their current arsenals to the future no-test environment. At this late date, now that the damage has been done, further ambiguity regarding India's ultimate nuclear intentions benefits nobody, least of all India.

The cagey and evasive Indian official statements with respect to the CTBT and fissile material cutoff treaties, while obviously designed to soften international condemnation of India's action, have been widely dismissed, and rightly so. If you were one of those diplomats, scientists, and citizen activists who over four decades painstakingly brought the CTBT into existence, what would you think of India's wobbly pronouncement that it "would be prepared to consider being an adherent to some of the undertakings in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but this obviously cannot be done in a vacuum. It would necessarily be an evolutionary process from concept to commitment and would depend on a number of reciprocal activities." What on earth does this mean? One would hardly know from this statement that the CTBT has already been signed by 149 countries and ratified by 13, including Japan, the U.K., and France! There is a political blindness, or arrogance, at work here that is taking India down a very dark path indeed.

The Indian government's May 11 statement reiterates its support for "efforts to realize the goal of a truly comprehensive international arrangement which would prohibit underground nuclear testing of all weapons as well as related experiments described as 'sub-critical' or 'hydronuclear'." But two days later the Indian government announced that it had conducted two sub-kiloton tests "for improved computer simulation of designs and for attaining the capability to carry out subcritical experiments, if considered necessary." So are we to believe that the Indian government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on developing this new capability, only so it can persuade the parties to an already completed test ban treaty to change the treaty in order to ban such experiments?

These and other contradictory Indian government pronouncements of the last few days strain credulity and leave policymakers in other capitals shaking their head in bemused confusion, "What do the Indians want? Do they know themselves? And do they care at all about the impact of their grand gestures on the decisions and actions of other states?" In fairness to India, it is certainly true that the Clinton and Yeltsin Administrations have been dithering and backpedaling on their commitments under the NPT to negotiate the elimination of nuclear arsenals, and the U.S., for its part, has embarked on a hugely ambitious "Stockpile Stewardship Program" to "offsett" the restrictive impact of the CTBT on the U.S. nuclear arsenal that India ostensibly finds particularly offensive. But the international environment for nuclear nonproliferation and arms reductions is better now than it has been for almost half a century, rendering India's "arming-to-disarm" justification for it actions highly suspect.

The impact of India's tests has been both immediate and damaging for those who work for disarmament within the American political system. The 1992 "Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell Amendment" established an indefinite moratorium on U.S. nuclear testing after September 30, 1996, that, with or without the entry-into force of the CTBT, remained in force "unless another country tests" after that date. This vital public law, the subject of repeated but unsuccessful attacks by right wing elements opposed to the test ban and nuclear disarmament, has now been voided in an instant by India's ill considered action.

But that is not all. India's successful concealment of its true intentions, both in face-to-face official diplomacy and in the actual performance of the test preparations at the Pokhran site, has embarrassed the U.S. intelligence community and lead to charges of an "intelligence failure" that is already damaging prospects for ratification of the CTBT. The Clinton Administration's case for CTBT verification of low yield seismic events rests heavily on the ability to detect test site preparations and thereby identify the events as nuclear, or at least gather sufficient information to trigger a request for on-site inspection. India's recent actions have only served to confirm all the muddle-headed right wing shibboleths about what "a dangerous world it is out there" and how foolish it would be for the U.S. to forego important nuclear capabilities for the sake of "paper agreements that can't be verified."

If the CTBT ultimately unravels as a result of India's ill-considered actions, and nuclear explosions once again rock the earth in the five declared weapons states and other states as well, I doubt the rest of the world will find much consolation in the notion that India was ostensibly acting in accordance with its "principled" stand against "nuclear discrimination" and in favor of a "timebound disarmament." The international community will remember a nation whose long delayed and now utterly improbable nuclear ambitions came cloaked in the rhetoric of disarmament, and it won't be fooled again.