Kapur offers a history of Indian nuclear behavior that examines the interplay between domestic and international factors anchored on the hypothesis that the “impact of the external environment has been critical in the Indian case” (p. 20). The dynamic relationship between internal and external factors is analyzed through discussions of different axes: political-scientific, personal-bureaucratic, external-bureaucratic, arms control–strategic. He clearly seeks to set his argument as a corrective to analyses that have emphasized the domestic political variable in Indian nuclear decisions (George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation 1998, and Harald Muller, “The Death of Arms Control,” Disarmament Diplomacy 29 [August/September 1998]). One strength of the book is that in doing so, Kapur does not ignore the domestic context, but rather attempts to show how Indian domestic politics and international factors reinforced a linear trend toward nuclearization.

Kapur dedicates three of his eight chapters specifically to the domestic context. Although he discusses many variables, I found three main points to be most intriguing. He argues forcefully that Indian nuclear behavior was set 1) in the context of pre-1947 independence thinking about development; 2) in a scientific-research context, which allowed but was not dependent upon a military purpose; and 3) in the interpersonal and elite-dominated bureaucratic relationships between scientists and leading politicians. The domestic sections of the book are interesting, but they lack documentation and detail in large measure because as Kapur admits, “even with archive material, our speculations may be hard to verify since Indian strategic decision-making appears to be mostly oral” (p. 173). The reader is left to rely on his established expertise and personal interviews to accept a conclusion that Indian domestic decision making was uniquely “dysfunctional” and “fragmented” (p. 249).

Set against this domestic backdrop, what were the critical external variables? Kapur argues that it was the China-Pakistan-U.S. axis and the increased P-5 (permanent members of the UN Security Council) coordination around the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that led to an Indian assessment that its strategic concerns were absolutely inconsequential. It is here that he makes his strongest and most counterintuitive argument. He suggests that an arms control treaty meant to ban testing combined with strategic indifference (rather than, say, direct hostile action that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s) to bring about explicit nuclear testing. What Kapur implies is that consolidation of the P-5 around the CTBT was clear indication that these states were indifferent to India's strategic concerns and that such indifference led to a hardening of the negotiating positions regarding the CTBT (since Indian concerns could be dismissed, India's negotiating position could be disregarded). India was thus faced in the mid-1990s with becoming completely marginalized in strategic affairs—Indian nuclear restraint was now transformed into what he bluntly sees as Indian weakness.

The most important point Kapur makes, however, is for the reader not to see the 1998 test as an emotional reaction or an act of defiance, but rather a strategic attempt to reorient the security landscape in Asia. It was a broader grasp at strategic and diplomatic relevancy. He writes convincingly that India views its external environment as multipolar. Although it is not his intent, this is perhaps Kapur's most interesting theoretical contribution—that regional polarity is more important than global polarity in explaining the behavior of certain states. His argument implies that the global balance of power (be it bipolar or currently perhaps unipolar) has only an indirect effect in that it may constrain options regarding Asian multipolarity. For example, he suggests that the shift in the global balance from the Cold War has left “unredistributed power” (pp. 213–14) in the Asian regional system for which India can compete. He places great weight on Chinese behavior as an important factor in undermining Indian security in the 1990s, but perhaps of greater importance is American complicity in allowing China to strengthen its relationships with Pakistan (in contravention of some arms control agreements) and expand its influence regionally. Since the United States tended to tolerate Chinese behavior even when China violated agreements, such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), but chastised and sanctioned India for not agreeing to sign those accords (even though India generally lived by their basic clauses), only one conclusion could be drawn—India was strategically alone. In this sense, Indian nuclear behavior is in accord with basic realist notions of self-help, relative power, and balancing, while it undermines arguments that emphasize the commonality of interests between democracies.

A focus on the interaction between the domestic and international is the best way to sustain Kapur's argument that the strategic environment was critical. If India could have engaged in an explicit nuclear weapons program in the early 1960s and if the external environment was key to Indian nuclear behavior, how can we explain restraint in the face of three wars (China and two with Pakistan) and the explicit nuclearization of the adversary against whom India had lost a conventional conflict (China)? Kapur's answer is that a shift in bureaucratic coalitions in the 1980s–90s led to the Indian military playing a role in nuclear debates for the first time. This new domestic variable was an intervening factor in highlighting the assessment that the external environment of 1998 was actually worse for Indian security than the strategic environment of the 1960s–70s.

In rather Thucydideanesque terms, he concludes that “the fear of isolation and marginalization as a consequence of Western, Chinese, and Pakistani provocations and pressures explains India's strong action in May 1998” (p. 7). That said, the strategic environment has never been good for India, and one is left intrigued, but not wholly convinced, by Kapur's insistence that the external environment was key. What the book lacks is what the author explicitly avoids—analytical clarity that could provide the reader a basis on which to assess the relative weights of all of the domestic and international factors he includes (and he includes quite a few). Those seeking an explanatory framework that might be developed from the Indian case in order to understand nuclear behavior of states in general will be disappointed. The author does not attempt such a generalizable treatment nor provide much of a basis for such development. Rather, he weaves an engaging story of policy consistency (develop nuclear option but do not exercise it) in the face of internal and external fluidity that changes, not abruptly but as the result of long-established trends. Although a nuclear test appears as a dramatic debarkation point, Kapur assists us in understanding the perhaps-unique nuclear behavior of India by revealing the undercurrents that imperceptively but invariably led to India's joining the nuclear weapon club. Curiously, his message seems to be that India has moved to a status predicted realistically for most aspiring powers, yet has behaved uniquely in doing so. Whether realists or nonproliferation advocates (who would wish to emphasize the unique nature of India's proliferation) will find comfort in this book is unclear. If Kapur is correct that India sought to be taken seriously, whether is nuclear status has achieved such an end also remains an open question.