This, ironically, was to have been the week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got a feel-good update from the State Department on the new level of friendship and understanding between this nation and India. What a difference a few nuclear holes in the desert can make.

Instead, it’s the week for finger pointing and chest thumping. Finger pointing because the United States caught India in the act of developing its nuclear program back in 1995 and did nothing but scold. India learned a valuable lesson — work around the CIA’s 9-to-5 schedule.

More finger pointing because Hindu nationalists won control two months ago on a platform pledging to make India a nuclear power and no one here took them seriously. No one figured that Indian politicians, unlike their American counterparts, just might keep their campaign promises. The Clinton administration and the American intelligence community richly deserve the abuse being heaped upon them, although it does nothing to make planet Earth a safer place.

The chest thumping comes in the form of economic sanctions. The United States must punish India — it’s the law — but it’s likely the hardest blows will fall upon American business. If India has the brainpower to build nuclear weapons, it surely is smart enough to figure out that the outraged nations of the world will not stand as one for long. Russia already is yawning. The European Union has the matter under advisement. Japan says it may freeze a grant or two. One by one, countries with trade on their minds will fall away. India’s population of potential consumers is too immense, its developing economy too full of potential, to let principle, or even self-preservation, stand in the way.

So the world’s five-member nuclear family — the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain — now is six. If Pakistan, India’s arch-enemy, follows through on its threat to test its own devices (which it says it can do at a moment’s notice), the table must be set for seven.

About all The Five can do is to take Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at his word. He won election by promising India the bomb, he now says India will give up its new and dreadful toy if the others do the same. The nuclear nations have repeatedly rejected proposals to eliminate their arsenals. This might be a good time to reconsider. Or perhaps they’ll wait until North Korea is locked and loaded.

President Clinton and his foreign policy advisers are left with three problems — how to punish India, how to dissuade Pakistan and how to rebuild an intelligence network worthy of a modicum of confidence. The first two may well be unsolvable. For the third, they might start by putting someone in the CIA on the midnight shift.