India And Pakistan Go Nuclear
- Date
- 1998
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- South Asia (India/Pakistan)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
India and Pakistan openly joined the nuclear club in May 1998, detonating a rapid series of underground tests that transformed South Asia into a region of declared nuclear rivals.
India fired first, conducting five blasts at Pokhran in the Rajasthan desert on 11 May under the codename Operation Shakti, a program long championed by Hindu nationalists who had returned to power weeks earlier. Pakistan responded on 28 May with its own tests, dubbed Chagai-I, in the Balochistan mountains, its prime minister declaring the country had "settled the score." The tit-for-tat detonations drew swift international sanctions and alarmed a world that had hoped the Cold War's end would slow proliferation. For India, the tests fulfilled decades of ambition and asserted great-power status; for Pakistan, they were an existential equaliser against a far larger neighbour. The overt nuclearisation of two nations that had fought three wars and shared a bitterly contested border over Kashmir raised the stakes of every future crisis, injecting the permanent shadow of atomic escalation into one of the planet's most volatile rivalries, and became a defining strategic reality of the subcontinent for generations to come.
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Empires active in 1998
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Further reading
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