May 28th. Just a date for world, I suppose. But for me, for so many of us who call Pakistan home, it’s a date that sends a shiver down the spine – a shiver of memory, of relief, of a grim but necessary pride. It’s the day the earth physically shook under our feet in the Chagai hills, but metaphorically, it was the day our nation felt it could finally stand straight, shoulders unbowed. Yom-e-Takbeer – the “Day of Greatness.” And from where I stood, and still stand, it absolutely was.

I can still feel the spring of 1998 in my bones. The air wasn’t just thick with the dust and the promise of a scorching summer; it was suffocating with a tension so raw you could almost taste it. India, our neighbour – and let’s be honest, our history is complicated, to put it mildly – had just detonated its nuclear devices. Pokhran-II. The news landed like a punch to the gut. Suddenly, the delicate, always-fraught balance of power in our region didn’t just feel tilted; it felt like it had completely capsized. That old, familiar ache of vulnerability crept in – a fear for our very sovereignty.

And then the pressure. Oh, the pressure. It descended on us like a suffocating blanket. From every corner of the globe, a chorus of voices – some cajoling, some demanding, some openly threatening – urging, almost commanding, Pakistan to show “restraint.” Don’t test, they said. Sanctions were dangled over us like the sword of Damocles. Aid packages were hinted at if we........

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