Engaging India

India set off three nuclear devices in the Thar Desert in May 1998, jolting its already strained relationship with the United States. Pakistan matched the move with its own first nuclear test two weeks later, and the crisis grew worse.

Strobe Talbott, the American lead in the talks that followed, gives an inside account of the diplomacy. From June 1998 to September 2000 he and Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh met fourteen times in seven countries across three continents. Their agenda covered immediate security and nonproliferation issues as well as longer-term hopes for economic and strategic cooperation. In summer 1999 the dispute over Kashmir brought the two nuclear powers close to war, and Talbott describes for the first time the part Washington played in defusing it.

The talks helped prepare the ground for President Bill Clinton's visit to India in March 2000, which ended fifty years of estrangement between the world's two largest democracies. With militant groups still active across South Asia, Talbott argues that the cooperation he and Singh built remains important. The source text ends abruptly, so the closing argument is only partly given here.