Foreign Trade in India, Dynamics of the New Foreign Policy

One area which saw the cumulative impact of all these transitions in a powerful manner was India's nuclear diplomacy. After years of promoting idealistic slogans such as universal disarmament, India by the late 1990s recognized the importance of becoming a declared nuclear weapon power. Despite the steady nuclearization of its security environment over the decades, India remained ambiguous about its attitudes to its national own nuclear weapons programme. Even as it tested a nuclear device in 1974, India refused to follow through with the nuclear weapons project. By the late 1990s, though, India found it necessary to make itself an unambiguous nuclear power. The economic growth of the decade gave it the self-confidence that it could ride through the inevitable international reaction to it. India was also right it betting that a country of its size and economic potential could not be sanctioned and isolated for too long. Even more important, India sensed that there might be diplomatic opportunities for getting the great powers acknowledge if not legitimize its nuclear weapons programme and remove the high technology sanctions against it. Within seven years after its second round of nuclear testing in 1998, India signed the historic nuclear deal with the Bush Administration in July 2005 under which the U.S. agreed to change its domestic non-proliferation law and revise the international guidelines on nuclear cooperation in favour of India.