The left has said that the blasts have started an arms race in the subcontinent. But there has always been an arms race in the region, and extending it to the nuclear field will not have any great financial impact. As a matter of fact, the wastage of war will now be permanently avoided. The possession of nuclear capability will mean that conventional armed forces can now be reduced. Sanctions would in any case have been imposed when the time limit for signing the CTBT ran out. It was a case of sanctions today versus sanctions tomorrow, unless, of course, India signed the CTBT without protest. Given the China-Pakistan axis, that option would not have been in India's security interests. The government, therefore, had little alternative but to test. To the argument that economic strength is all that matters, we would say that there is no guarantee that we will achieve that strength. Instead of becoming an economic power while giving up military strength, as the peaceniks would like, we could wellhave ended up being a second rate economic as well as second rate military power. The guns versus butter argument is simplistic, given India's low defence spending to GDP ratio. And if economic power is everything, how come all the five permanent members of the Security Council are all nuclear powers? Would the West have bothered about an economically prostrate Russia if it were not for its geo-political clout? And finally, to the notion that we are too poor to afford the luxury of nuclear security, we would ask -- what was China's per capita income when it decided to go nuclear?