India and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

In this chapter, I unpack how India negotiates the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, recounting the transnational pressures pushing toward test ban negotiations and why those developments served India’s interests having pulled for such an agreement for decades. This legacy of disarmament diplomacy strongly influenced the approach adopted by the overseeing institution Ministry of External Affairs at CTBT negotiations where Indian diplomats strove to negotiate an agreement that placed uniform constraints vis-à-vis nuclear tests on both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states. And finally, I distil how domestic interest groups, namely security and nuclear experts, shaped public debates concerning the CTBT which, in turn, gave MEA officials more space to determine whether to ratify or reject the treaty once it became clear that India’s strategy would not have produced the agreement they desired.