Poverty, mushroom clouds, and monkeys in the ministries.

"I was aware of a little nuclear arms race involving Pakistan, China, and India when I first proposed a visit to India in September '97," Jim Boyd said. "It was going to be more a country tour than a nuke-arms tour. . . . But then the nuclear tests changed that."

And what a nuke-arms trip it was.

Last November, eleven NCEW members traveled from Delhi to Jaipur to Agra to Islamabad to Mumbai - from ministries with silk couches and formal lunches to shantytowns with families living on the equivalent of a dollar a day. Our main mission: To see why, in May 1998, despite their dire economies and the worldwide post-Cold War disarmament regime, India and Pakistan decided to test their nuclear bombs.

In Old Delhi at the massive Red Fort, to throngs of Indian students, we - not they - were exotic sights, with our notebooks and questions. One group of girls told us the nuclear tests were a bad, dangerous thing, and "all the kids at school feel that way" - a bit of wisdom that somehow eluded the mouths of many of their elders.

Curiously, at India's Defense Ministry, we were greeted by rhesus monkeys on the fence and scampering through the halls past soldiers with automatic rifles. George Fernandes, the defense minister, in sandals and a Nehru-type jacket, briefed us on his unlikely peacenik past. When India tested a nuclear device in 1974, he actually was in jail for organizing a railway workers' strike. There he wrote a pro-disarmament pamphlet, India's Bombs and Indira's India.

With us, however, in his briefing room - it has a bronze model of a Prithvi missile by the door - he championed India's armed forces and restated that the country needs a deterrent against potential military threats from China and Pakistan.

Pressed by Daryl Kimball of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, the only non-journalist on our trip, as to whether India intended to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Fernandes said the treaty "does not have to do with banning," but rather it sanctifies the five powers that already have enormous arsenals and "says to the other countries, you shall not have it."

Later, K.C. Singh, the joint secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs, a tall, slender, elegant man in a blue turban and mushroom-grey business suit, spoke of India's nuclear capability as kind of culmination of post-colonial sovereignty. He fielded our questions on the troubling pre-election violence going on then outside Delhi, and noted that the United States too had "political quirks," citing as an example the fact that Minnesota had just elected a wrestler as its governor.

Our two Minneapolis travelers groaned. "It's disconcerting that even in Delhi you know about this wrestler," Kate Stanley said.

Undaunted, we flew to Rajasthan, where the maharajas once kept royal ladies in architectural structures with latticed windows and screened balconies so they could watch the city but nobody could see them. Then at Patrika, the state's largest business newspaper, we were asked the oft-repeated: "Why does the United States think it can tell us whether or not to have nuclear weapons?"

On our bus trip from Jaipur to Agra, the roads were jammed with streetcars, bicycles, carts, tractors, rickshaws, camels, cows, sheep, and painted trucks with glittering ornaments. Occasionally all of it came to a dead halt.

Once we de-bused at a tiny agricultural village full of children with big, dark eyes. "Bien, bien," they said, begging for money. Even "pen," asking for tools to write. So we passed out ball-point pens, notebook paper, and pamphlets from Patrika - and wondered, can this be the same country that just tested nuclear weapons?

When we reached the Taj Mahal, the epitome of tranquility and peace, we all relaxed. "So, Mr. Boyd, we're at the Taj f-king Mahal," said Don Harrison and for us, that said it all.

Next stop, Pakistan: a Koranic prayer at takeoff was piped into our airplane cabin. Just outside Islamabad, in the pottery village of Saidpur, Joann Byrd, Gordon Winters, and I stepped back in time amid shepherds, goats, and burbling mountain streams; the next minute we fast-forwarded in a jeep to Attaturk Highway.

Soon at the Islamabad Marriott, a panel of editors and politicians said Pakistan had detonated its bombs only in reaction to India's blasts. Moreover, they said, South Asia had not seen "very stable and mature decision making on the part of the West" with regard to its own weapons of mass destruction - and challenged America for moralizing about nonproliferation goals to the world.

"When the U.S. had the bomb," one editor said, "you could not resist using it."

"A nuclear Asia is a more stable Asia," another panelist put in.

"OK, so we are two nuclear powers," another said, "so what are we going to do about it? . . . So what if we've cooperated with China? We are a sovereign nation. It is our right."

That night the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, briefed us in milder tones. She spoke of an age gap, a pro-nuclear older generation of people with keen memories of the bloody 1947 partition vs. a new global generation, "expressing concern that Pakistan chose the path of proliferation."

Back to India for a weekend in cosmopolitan Mumbai, we saw glitzy high-tech billboards and skyscrapers along the Arabian Sea that reminded me of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive skyline.

On Saturday we conferred with social workers about women's rights and child abuse, and a Credit Suisse Bank economist, who summed up: "Indians have always been capitalists, but India has always been socialist." Moreover, he added, the global reality was that neither India nor Pakistan could afford a war.

In a final free day of sightseeing, some of us visited Jain temples, the Gandhi and Prince of Wales museums, the Hanging Gardens, and outdoor markets, rode rickshaws, saw sea turtles at the aquarium - and relaxed.

It was great to go home but there were many reasons to have been glad for this unique, intense, provocative, professional, and highly personal experience.

NCEW's Foreign Affairs Educational Program is planning trips to Russia this June and Cuba and/or Iran in November. Foundation underwriting makes these trips affordable even for many smaller newspapers. For more information, contact Jim Boyd, International Affairs Committee chair, at 612/673-4470.

NCEW member Carolee B. Morrison is international editor at The New York Times Syndicate. Her e-mail address is [e-mail]