Sumit Ganguly's article Pathway to Pokhran II is a relatively dispassionate effort to rationalize India's May 1998 nuclear tests and nuclear breakout (i.e., avowal of nuclear weapons).' His description of the main ingredients of India's nuclear decisionmaking before 1990 covers much of the relevant terrain. His assessment of the relative weight of nuclear weapon drivers (preferences of top policymakers, impulses in the nuclear and missile technology programs, and external pressures or threats) is open to serious questions, however, as is his interpretation of the reasons behind the fateful decisions of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Ganguly's explanation of India's nuclear breakout essentially rests on a retrospective selection of Indian elite statements that purport to reflect of Indian security interests. An Indo-centric perceptual analysis may be one reasonable starting point for explaining Indian decisions, but it is not necessarily the end point of a serious empirical analysis. Moreover, it is a shaky basis for Ganguly's U.S. policy recommendations. His analysis is not comparably grounded in the perceptions and interests of India's neighbors, and it begs other issues crucial to designing successful policy responses. Ganguly depicts India's pathway to overt nuclear weapons as a zigzag response to external threats and to the failure of the big powers to provide India nuclear security, notwithstanding India's earlier policy renunciation of nuclear weapons (pp. 150-151). He implies that India had to zig and zag because its resources were constrained and developing nuclear and delivery capabilities took a long time (Ganguly describes the process as haphazard, discontinuous, and ridden with setbacks [p. 171]), while problems in India's external security environment rose and fell episodically (see five phases, pp. 149-171). Ganguly admits that domestic politics occasionally accelerated nuclear weapon-related decisions, but argues that these influences were not fundamental. He specifically denounces the observation that India's craving for international