Hypocrisy is the word that springs to mind as our government professes shock and outrage over India's nuclear weapons tests yet forges ahead with a vast new multibillion dollar weapons program of its own. PNS commentator Bruce Allen is a writer and activist with Peace Action.

The White House, Congress and the media profess to be shocked or mystified at India's recent nuclear tests in a world struggling toward nuclear disarmament. But one need look no further than March 20 of this year for an act that helped push the buttons in New Delhi.

On that day, 900 feet under the Nevada desert, the United States conducted the third in an ongoing series of nuclear test explosions which it calls "subcritical." These are detonations of plutonium and dynamite which stop just short of achieving critical mass and a sustained chain reaction.

In other words, we no longer need to test full-scale bombs. We can use supercomputers with data from subcritical tests to predict the effects of a full-scale explosion with great precision.

The Clinton Administration claims such tests are exempt from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the president signed with great fanfare in 1996. No other nation has the technology to conduct such tests.

These tests are part of a $40 billion U.S. investment in developing another generation of nuclear weapons -- even as some of the old ones are dismantled.

This project is called "Stockpile Stewardship" -- a name that implies watching over existing warheads until they are disarmed.

But Stockpile Stewardship involves designing and testing new weapons while maintaining a guise of compliance with the CTBT. It has already been instrumental in designing replacement warheads for the Trident submarine fleet as well as new "bunker buster" bombs, capable of penetrating underground targets.

It also includes the $5 billion National Ignition Facility, which will use the world's largest laser array to create laboratory-scale hydrogen bomb blasts. Another effort is the $250 million Academic Strategic Alliances Program, a collaboration with five major universities to advance high-performance computer simulation of nuclear detonations.

While the Stockpile Stewardship program has largely been ignored by the U.S. media and hence the U.S. public, it's no secret to the rest of the world. When the first subcritical test went off last July, it was immediately condemned by many observers -- including India, which refused to sign the CTBT because it failed to expressly forbid such high-tech high jinks.

"India has taken note of the 'subcritical' underground nuclear test conducted by the USA. . . . and is concerned that this has been justified as an activity permitted under the CTBT," the Foreign Ministry stated at the time. "It is a matter of regret that . . . the CTBT contains loopholes which are exploited by some countries."

Now, less than two months after our third subcritical blast, our leaders claim they can't comprehend what could have driven India to conduct an old-fashioned, untidy blast. White House spokesman Mike McCurry can say India's actions run "counter to the effort the international community is making to promulgate a ban on such testing."

And Clinton himself admonished that India "can be a great country in the 21st century without doing things like this. It simply is not necessary to manifest national greatness by doing this. It is a terrible mistake."

Some Administration supporters justify the Stockpile Stewardship program as a way of coaxing a reluctant Republican-dominated Congress to ratify the CTBT when it comes up for a vote later this year.

Therein lies the tragedy. Despite the fervent desire for total nuclear disarmament, shared by an overwhelming majority of citizens everywhere, all it takes is a few hard-liners in Washington, DC or New Delhi, to blow it to kingdom come.