Our train ride from Jodhpur became increasingly sandier the farther west we went toward Jaisalmer. Somewhere past Osiyan, the scrubby brush along the tracks ends, and the sand takes over completely. By the time we got to Pokaran (or Pokhran) the train shimmied and yawed along tracks warped by the 120-degree heat as they passed over shifting dunes.

On the berth across the aisle from us, two young women rummaged through their backpacks, eventually pulling out the French Lonely Planet guide to India. They were asleep when we boarded the train in Jodhpur, presumably taking the overnight express from Dehli or Jaipur. While they slept, Lisa and I passed our English copy between us, reading about where we were going and where we had just spent the night and the ominous-sounding Marwar, or “region of death.”

The train was mostly empty, and many of the travelers were in the army. Officers in untucked uniforms talked to enlisted soldiers in their civvies. A few of them sat across from us for a while, facing us and carrying on in their halting English. Perhaps a half-hour outside Pokaran I got out my map to see if I could figure out how much farther we had left. (Our train left Jodhpur late, rendering the schedule moot.) Sunil the soldier pointed to Pokaran, his destination. His buddies took a lot of interest in the map actually, and the voice of Rob, my cartographically-inclined coworker, played somewhere in the part of my American brain that I had set aside to keep me out of trouble on the trip: “In many countries, maps and imagery are national secrets.”

I suspected that Pokaran, our next major stop, was the same Pokhran where India exploded five nuclear weapons in 1998 and where they continue “special” weapons activity. But I wasn’t going to ask.

I had previously asked Nimmi about India’s nuclear weapons after learning that her president, Abdul Kalam, was the scientist instrumental in the 1998 weapons tests. What was the mood like? We were mighty proud. So it’s more than strategic deterrence against Pakistan? Absolutely. (A couple of Pakistani coworkers have shared similar sentiments about their nation’s nuclear program over the years, too.)

I’m still amazed. I understand the mental process that justifies a small-scale deterrence against another nuclear nation that you’ve had several wars with. I really do, even if I disagree with it. Like most Americans I wish we could put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, forget Duck and Cover, and not worry about WMDs anymore. Given that Iran is seriously jonesing for a nuke of their own and that A.Q. Khan was doing brisk business before he was officially “shut down,” that seems very unlikely to happen.

But GWB says it’s time for us to stop worrying and learn to love the Indian bomb. India had the bomb in 1974 before the nuclear nonproliferation treaty went into effect, so it’s just correcting past colonial intolerance, wrote one reader to the Times. Or maybe it didn’t have it — like North Korea, Israel, and South Africa, sometimes it’s hard to tell. India’s chargé d’affiares in Washington emphatically claimed today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, that the India-US nuclear deal was all about nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons. However you explain it away, we’re approaching a point where the NPT is approaching irrelevance as a deterrent.

Still I can see the Indian point-of-view with respect to nukes — both power and (to a lesser degree) weapons. India needs power to continue growing their economy and to serve the hundreds of millions of their citizens without reliable electricity. As with every developed nation, electricity is a national security issue. Supposedly the American part of the deal is about civilian nuclear power, with an impermeable firewall between that fissile material and technology and India’s nuclear weapons “non-program.” We trust India enough to take their fissile material (or MATLAB or whatever) and not use it to make bombs or give it to Pakistan or sell it to al Qaeda. Everything’s above board and on the straight and narrow in India.

Besides, we Americans have our own security issues, so the story goes. We need all of the yummy oil we can get; and we have to keep the man down in Iran. The most interesting thing I read in India was a set of articles in the rather fair-minded Economic Times concerning U.S. interference in energy politics in Central and South Asia. In the very Cold War-esque post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, the economic development of India and Pakistan — one a vital business partner, the other a vital partner in the war on terror™ — comes second to keeping Iran from getting anything until they give up nukes. Still, it seems like a mixed message to nuclear would-bes.

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When we were visiting Bara Bagh on the outskirts of Jaisalmer, we met a couple of bored university students at the maharajas’ cenotaphs who showed us around. All along the horizon were giant wind turbines. “They’re for the military. The city’s power comes from hundreds of kilometers away . . . along with the water.”