Nobody expected India--the country that produced pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi--to go nuclear so soon or so suddenly. But that's what it did in May 1998, detonating five nuclear weapons, to the world's astonishment. George Perkovich offers a comprehensive survey of how India got the bomb, starting with early technical efforts dating back 50 years and concluding with a full treatment of exactly what India did in the Rajasthan desert and why. He challenges the conventional wisdom holding that countries pursue nuclear power mainly for security reasons. Perkovich says the motives, at least in India's case (and, he believes, in the case of other developing countries), were much more complex. An overwhelming desire for global recognition and national pride trumped everything else. He suggests the United States might have done more to head off recent events had the nation not lacked a coherent policy toward South Asia thanks to cold-war politics. India's rivalry with Pakistan didn't help, either; it's extremely difficult to be on very good terms with both nations at once. The footnotes are extensive and the details sometimes can seem overwhelming, but the book's topic may be one of the most important issues of the 21st century. In short, George Perkovich and India's Nuclear Bomb are to India what Richard Rhodes and The Making of the Atomic Bomb are to the United States. --John J. Miller