Kalam puts up his hand in support of the nuclear deal Former president Abdul Kalam, a founder of the Indian missile programme and a person committed to a vision of India as an active player in the international system, has been attacked by some for having allegedly abandoned the idea of strategic autonomy because of his support for the Indo-US nuclear deal. Kalam has reiterated his stand on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 1998 nuclear tests and he has done so in the presence of two other architects of the tests, R Chidambaram, the chief weapons designer and the then chairman of the Department of Atomic Energy, and the present chairman, Anil Kakodkar. Kalam has explained that India needs uranium imports to sustain its nuclear power programme and to develop thorium conversion to uranium in the fast breeder reactors. Earlier, M R Srinivasan, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a reactor engineer, had warned that our domestic uranium ore supplies