The long-term strategic aim of India's surprise nuclear tests may be to challenge U.S. supremacy in the Indian Ocean. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, who traveled widely in India in 1997, explores the logic behind the tests for India's new leaders. Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at U.C. Berkeley, is author of numerous books on global politics, including "The Logic of World Power."

India's five surprise nuclear tests give the new nationalist government a big public opinion boost. They also serve to warn China, terrify Pakistan, and make a bid for membership in the elite nuclear club.

But a much less obvious reason may turn out to be the most important in the long run -- to challenge U.S. supremacy in the Indian Ocean.

The speed of American reaction suggests this is being taken seriously. Apparently, President Clinton decided on sanctions -- which could be as damaging as those imposed on Iraq -- only hours after the first three tests.

In a pre-test statement, Indian defense minister George Fernandes named China as the greatest foreign threat to India. But he also said, "In my heart, I don't believe China is very soon going to come into the Indian Ocean. But when it develops a big regional navy, it will." Only days before, high-ranking Chinese military officials were in New Delhi toasting the newly improved relations between the two countries.

A few weeks earlier, Prime Minister Vajpayee had said that Pakistan does not now pose a major threat to India.

However, the U.S. Seventh Fleet is, here and now, the big regional navy which dominates the Indian Ocean.

Before 1971, the Seventh Fleet's area of concern did not go beyond the Western Pacific. Then its jurisdiction was extended to cover the entire Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia, the small British-held island to India's south, became the hub of U.S. Indian Ocean naval power. At that time, a big Soviet fleet was anchored in South Yemen. Today the Soviet fleet has vanished and it will be decades before any comparable Chinese fleet could consider entering the Indian Ocean. That leaves only the Seventh Fleet.

Over a year ago, India announced the formation of a new Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) -- an announcement largely ignored by the world, even in India. The move, according to one of India's then foremost communist leaders, the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad, was a challenge to American domination of the Indian Ocean. Asked whether it would be a military challenge, he laughed. "We can't be a match for the Seventh Fleet but we can become politically dominant in the Indian Ocean."

Today the IOC has some two dozen members, mostly from Southeast Asia and East Africa, regions with which India has had close economic and cultural ties for over a thousand years. India's new Bharatiya Janata government is determined to expand the economic reforms launched by former prime minister Narasinha Rao, and foreign trade will be a big component of that policy. Economic, cultural and political links with Southeast Asia and East Africa will be key elements in that build-up.

The U.S. is not just a big military presence in the Indian Ocean but also a political one whose raison d'etre is U.S. dependence on Mideastern oil. The Mideast has given the U.S. huge migraines for years. Evidently, the CIA did not warn the White House that India was about to make the situation even worse.

India has been mad at the U.S. for a long time. The U.S. has long favored Pakistan, then in 1971 it started cultivating ties with China. While U.S.-China relations first cooled under Clinton, they have now warmed to a point of close cooperation. All this Washington did without informing New Delhi.

But temper tantrums are not why India set off these nuclear weapons tests. India's leaders clearly have broader and longer aims.

In mid-October, 1964, Mao Zedong ordered an atmospheric test of China's first nuclear devices. At the time, this appeared to be a direct challenge to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now we know they were mainly intended as a challenge to China's earlier communist ally, the Soviet Union. In March 1969, the two giants waged a mini-war against each other. However, unexpected new ties arose between the U.S. and China.

This time it's possible a similar course of events could transpire. On the surface China appears to be the political target of the Indian tests. Yet in the longer run the emergence of India as the only indigenous nuclear power in the Indian Ocean could mean a new and major challenge to America's global solo superpower role.