India's nuclear dilemma

Nations, like individuals, are at some stage in their lives called upon to take momentous decisions which materially alter the course of their future history. In a small world such as ours, often these decisions have grave repercussions far beyond national borders. Such a decision today faces the Indian people should the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru "go nuclear" and join the mad arms race which its leaders have time and again deplored? Or should it stay out and use its influence, together with other like-minded nations, to try and pull the existing nuclear powers away from the precipice beyond which lies mass death and total destruction?

In all conscience, this is a cruel, excruciatingly hard decision to take for any nation. It is doubly so for a developing country. like India which during the brief two decades of her existence as an independent nation has had to cope with problem piling upon. problem, each clamouring for urgent solution, and which is economically still not out of the woods. To go nuclear or not is, however, a different kind of problem. It is a problem before which all other problems India has faced pale into insignificance. The stake is her security.