ABSTRACT

This chapter traverses into the post-Cold War period, taking into consideration the Bill Clinton administration’s nuclear foreign policy towards India between 1993 and 2001. The chapter highlights the debates surrounding the great power narratives that in turn entailed consequences for the conduct of US nuclear foreign policy. These five great power narratives are: debating ‘Hindu radicalism’ and its propensity to practice peace; the geopolitical, cultural, and economic dimensions of US-Soviet Union and India-Pakistan nuclear deterrence; ‘greatness’ in relation to the Clinton administration’s understanding of democratic principles that define America; a ‘struggling’ economy on the path of reforms; a second-tier state’s quest to demonstrate ‘technological prowess’. The American nuclear subjectivity tied inextricably to the global nuclear order comes to be renegotiated through relations of difference in ‘race’, ‘political economy’, and ‘gender’, as West/East continuum and North/South divide was again re-appropriated to engender ‘self’ through relations of ‘radical otherness’ and ‘otherness’.