Ploughshares and Swords

Front matter

INDIA’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM IN THE GLOBAL COLD WAR

JAYITA SARKAR

PLOUGHSHARES AND SWORDS

Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi

Abbreviations xv

Introduction: Freedom of Action WORLD WAR AND DECOLONIZATION

Introduction

Jawaharlal Nehru spent most of the Second World War in prison. Along with most leaders of the Indian National Congress, he was incarcerated in 1942 after the party adopted the Quit India Resolution against British colonial rule. Nehru was released in June 1945 when the war ended in Europe but continued in much of Asia. After US B-29 bombers dropped “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs on Japan, the destructive potential of nuclear fission deeply moved the future prime minister of independent India. Opposing the Muslim League’s calls to partition British India, Nehru emphatically declared at a rally in Lahore that “the talk about Pakistan sounds empty and meaningless in this age of atomic bombs. ”!

The dawn of the nuclear age was also the onset of the era of global decolonization. The Second World War weakened European colonialism, increasing anticolonial dissent in much of Asia, including British India. Anticolonial leaders—future statesmen of soon-to-be sovereign nation-states— recognized the vast potential of nuclear fission to develop and secure the nation. Their sociotechnical imaginaries of the nation influenced the organization, development, and pursuit of nuclear technologies.”

India’s nuclear program embodied the hopes and anxieties of a postwar colony at the cusp of independence. Its leaders hoped that their new nation-state would leapfrog toward economic development through big science projects, in which nuclear fission would feature prominently. In January 1947, Nehru, then the vice president of the interim government, a position equivalent to prime minister, declared as president of the Indian Science Congress, “This great force— atomic energy—that has suddenly come through scientific research may be used for war or may be used for peace. We cannot neglect it because it might be used for war; obviously, in India, we want to develop it, and we will develop it to the fullest.”?

Territoriality, or the attributes generated by the “control of bordered political space,” was immanent in decolonization.’ Territoriality in South Asia was manifest in hard borders but intermestic threats.’ The internal-external, domestic-international, and inside-outside were closely intertwined with important implications for what geopolitical challenges meant to the nation-state. As British colonial rule ended, the boundaries of modern India were shaped and reshaped through the bloody partition of 1947 and violent contestations over princely states such as Kashmir, Junagadh, and Hyderabad.‘ The processes of territoriality then continued through wars with adversarial neighbors, disputes over French colonial territories, seizures of Portuguese enclaves like Goa, annexation of Himalayan borderlands such as Sikkim, spatial reorganization of fraught regions as in the northeast, and frequent suppression of secessionist and Maoist movements.

The leaders of the nuclear program saw in nuclear fission the possibility to augment geopolitical goals of the territorial state as well as the technopolitical goals of the developmentalist state, leading to a large dual-use enterprise, simultaneously serving military and civilian ends.’ Technopolitics, or the use of technology to enact political goals, was not unique to India’s nuclear program. Yet, nuclear technologies were “inherently political artifacts” associated with “particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority.”* In India, a small group of elite scientists and engineers with access to political power, social capital, and global financial networks led the nuclear program. This powerful group with sophisticated technical expertise saw nuclear fission as intrinsically associated with the nation—both developing and securing it.

Freedom of action was a core element of the nuclear program, resulting from the sociotechnical imaginaries of political leaders like Nehru and scientific institution builders like Homi Jehangir Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. Freedom to act with autonomy meant to them the expansion of choices writ large in political, economic, social, and technological spheres—inside and outside the country.’ They, therefore, kept multiple technological options open, leading to a vast undertaking that could serve geopolitical ends and developmentalist goals simultaneously. (See map 1 and key to map, which is in table format on the facing page.)

Arabian Sea

Indian Ocean

Map 1. India’s key nuclear and space sites. Credit: Scott Walker, Harvard Map Collection.

The pursuit of freedom of action led to deliberate technological ambiguity in the nuclear program: Which technological objects were “ploughshares” and which ones “swords”?!° The ambiguity allowed its leaders to counter the regulation imposed by the nonproliferation regime as well as deflect criticism at home. In practice, the leaders of India’s nuclear program adopted a strategy of hyperdiversification through partnerships with foreign atomic energy commissions

Key to map 1

KEY ID INDIA FACILITY NAME (W)

1 Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay

2 Baroda Heavy Water Plant

3 Balasore Integrated Test Range

4 Department of Atomic Energy, Mumbai

5 Department of Space/Indian Space Research Organisation, Bangalore 6 High Energy Research Materials Laboratory (DRDO), Pune 7 Indira Gandhi Atomic Research Centre, Kalpakkam 8 Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

9 Jaduguda Uranium Mine

10 Kakrapar Atomic Power Station

11 Kaiga Atomic Power Station

12 Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant

13 Madras Atomic Power Station

14 Nangal Heavy Water Plant

15 Narora Atomic Power Station

16 Northeast Space Applications Centre, Shillong

17 Nuclear Fuel Complex, Hyderabad

18 Pokhran Test Site

19 Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad

20 Rajasthan Atomic Power Station

21 Rattehalli Uranium Enrichment Plant

22 Rare Earths Division, Aluva

23 Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad

24 Semiconductor Laboratory, Chandigarh

25 Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota

26 Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata

27 Talcher Heavy Water Plant

28 Tarapur Atomic Power Station

29 Terminal Ballistic Research Laboratory (DRDO), Chandigarh 30 Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station

31 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 32 Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai

33 Tutikorin Heavy Water Plant and private companies. They procured multiple types of research and power reactors. They pursued research and development of technologies of nuclear fission and outer space. They obtained technologies and materials from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. The large size of the nuclear program with a variety of technological artifacts that could concurrently serve civilian and military ends hid the program’s deficiencies, flaws, and failures. The

KEY ID PAKISTAN FACILITY NAME (A)

1 Atomic Energy Minerals Centre, Lahore

2 Chagai Hills Test Site

3 Chashma Nuclear Power Complex

4 Khan Research Laboratories, Kahuta

5 Karachi Nuclear Power Plant

6 Khushab Nuclear Complex

7 Multan Heavy Water Production Facility

8 Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Islamabad

9 Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, Rawalpindi

10 Wah Weapon Complex quest for freedom of action thus increased the leaders’ choices abroad while reducing democratic accountability at home.

This book charts the history of India’s nuclear program during its first forty years from the 1940s when it began until the 1980s when the program readapted to national, regional, and global pressures. It recounts why and how the leaders of the nuclear program prioritized certain kinds of technologies and technological systems over others. It is about the processes through which they pursued their freedom of action, the consequences of those pursuits, and their limitations. This book traces the global and local networks through which politically savvy scientists and engineers parlayed capital and political power to procure and redevelop myriad technological objects, which could concomitantly serve national goals of development and security.

The Nation and Fission

The first partnership between the future architects of India’s nuclear program began while anticolonial leaders like Nehru and Gandhi were still in prison. In 1942, five years before India’s independence, Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai met for the first time at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. The IISc was an eminent institution established in 1909 by the industrialist Tata family together with the king of Mysore. It was in wartime Bangalore that Bhabha and Sarabhai began their friendship and scientific collaboration, the fruits of which would earn them epithets as “fathers” of India’s nuclear and space programs, respectively.

After completing his PhD in physics at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, Bhabha had returned to India in 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War prevented him from returning to Europe to look for a permanent university position. He joined the IISc as a reader in theoretical physics with the support of C. V. Raman, who was a Nobel laureate in physics and the first Indian director of the IISc. Vikram Sarabhai had also returned to India following the outbreak of the war, after studying physics at the University of Cambridge. He began conducting research under Raman at the IISc.

Early institutional initiatives associated with India’s nuclear program were informal and scattered. Funding was procured mainly through family connections and corporate philanthropy, though at times with the support of the colonial government. In March 1944, at the height of the Burma Campaign (1942-45), Bhabha approached Sir Dorabji Tata Trust with the goal to fund a “vigorous school of research in fundamental physics.”'! The late Sir Dorabji Tata was Bhabha’s uncle, and his trust readily accepted the request, leading to the establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) on June 1, 1945.2 Nehru was still in prison—he would be released on June 15.

In its first months, TIFR resided at the IISc because Bhabha was based there. In December 1945, the British governor of Bombay inaugurated TIFR at the Kenilworth Building on Pedder Road at Bhabha’s family home. The location of Bombay (present-day Mumbai) was significant. Not only was it the home to Tatas and Bhabhas, but it was also nearly 900 miles from the capital of New Delhi. The location of TIFR and later of the nuclear program in and around Bombay would help to insulate the program from political influence as well as parliamentary oversight. Today, TIFR is located in Navy Nagar on the island of Colaba in Mumbai. The neighborhood derived its name from its past as an imperial military cantonment and a major site for British and US naval activities during the Second World War.

British India had a strong scientific knowledge base that had produced notable scientists like C. V. Raman, J. C. Ghosh, S. N. Bose, P. C. Ray, and many others." Many Indian scientists were educated and trained at prestigious European universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Paris, and Gottingen. As independence neared, the role of science and technology in future India became a source of disagreement between Nehru, who would become India’s first prime minister, and Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of nonviolent resistance against British colonial rule. Nehru’s faith that science and technology would enable India to advance toward economic modernity stood in opposition to Gandhi’s ideal of preindustrial village autarkies.'* Nehru wrote to Gandhi in October 1945: “I do not think it is possible for India to be really independent unless she is a technically advanced country. I’m not thinking for the moment in terms of just armies but rather of scientific growth. In the present context of the world we cannot even advance culturally without a strong background of scientific research in every department.” 1?

Nehru’s “pedagogical style of leadership,” to quote historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, placed great emphasis on the “scientific approach and temper” as the “temper of a free man.”'® Developing a free nation thus meant cultivating a scientific-minded citizenry. In November 1945, Nehru declared at the Royal Institute of Science in Bombay that “of all the big problems that face[d] India today nothing is more important than the development of scientific research, both pure and applied, and scientific method.” 1” Any “research Institute which has done pioneering work in this direction is, therefore, deserving of support” of the interim government, and of the soon-to-be independent Indian government. '’

For Nehru, large-scale government investment in scientific institutions was the way forward. His position aligned with the influential A. V. Hill Report of 1944 that had recommended government support for and control of industrial research in India, similar to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the United Kingdom, established during the First World War. Not all Indian scientists supported the centralization and government control proposed by the Hill Report, but those who opposed such as astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, director of Palit Laboratories at the University of Calcutta, were gradually sidelined.”

From an institutional standpoint, the roots of India’s nuclear program could be traced to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), formed during the Second World War by the colonial government and modeled on the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The CSIR established the Atomic Energy Research Committee over a year before India’s independence, which was on August 15, 1947. The committee initiated steps for the organization of nuclear fission research in India in its first meeting held on May 15, 1946, at Bombay House, the headquarters of Tata Industries. Homi Bhabha, founding director of TIFR and relative of the Tata family, chaired the meeting.”°

The Tatas were a notable Parsi Zoroastrian family, who owned India’s largest business conglomerate. Their “strategic philanthropy” cultivated a large network of scientific and technical expertise in colonial India, and in years after India’s independence.” They significantly influenced India’s nuclear program through direct patronage of TIFR and the involvement of Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy (J. R. D.) Tata, the chairman of Tata Sons, in the Board for Research on Atomic Energy.

The majority of India’s scientific elites supported early investment in a national nuclear program, an enthusiasm shared by Nehru. The 1947 partition of British India into Hindu-majority, secular India and Muslim-majority Pakistan moved more scientific talent to India than to Pakistan. Regardless of their places of birth and origin, most Hindu, Parsi, and Sikh scientists settled within the territorial borders of India after independence. For instance, CSIR’s director general Santi Swarup (S. S.) Bhatnagar was born and raised in the Shahpur district of Punjab, which became part of Pakistan. Meghnad Saha of the Palit Laboratories in Calcutta was born in East Bengal, which became East Pakistan after August 1947 and Bangladesh after December 1971.

Overlapping scientific, political, and social networks kept India’s nuclear and space programs rooted within the CSIR, TIFR, and IISc from early on. The same individuals led multiple institutions, thereby consolidating their hold on authority and access to power and capital. After the Atomic Energy Act created the Atomic Energy Commission of India (AECI) in 1948, Homi Bhabha became the AECI chairman while remaining the director of TIFR. The AECI itself was a three-member body that reported directly to the prime minister. The other two AECI members, other than Bhabha, were CSIR’s director general S. S. Bhatnagar and physicist K. S. Krishnan. Bhatnagar was also secretary to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Scientific Research of the Indian government and a TIFR council member from 1947.”

A large number of TIFR and IISc graduates went on to work in Trombay, just outside Bombay, where Bhabha set up India’s premier nuclear research laboratory known as the Atomic Energy Establishment (renamed as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre or BARC after his death). When Bhabha established the Indian National Committee for Space Research in 1962, Vikram Sarabhai led the committee, which was initially hosted at TIFR. When Sarabhai established the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 1969, he headquartered it in Bangalore to ensure close coordination with the IISc, which was also close to the rocket and satellite launch sites in peninsular India.

An interconnected web of a small number of individuals and institutions thus steered the deeply intertwined nuclear and space programs of India. The individuals who led the institutions were transnationally connected and politically astute scientists, engineers, and technocrats who held proximity to local capital and state power. They circulated through global networks of multilateral institutions like the United Nations (UN) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and scientific gatherings like the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. These scientific elite actors were not always policymakers in the exact sense of the word, but they enjoyed unwavering support from those at the helm of political and economic power. The AECI chairman, who was also the secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) after 1954, worked directly under the prime minister’s office.”

The eminent institutional positions of these elite scientists and engineers often resulted from social and economic privileges that preceded their involvement in India’s nuclear and space programs. They were always men, who wore multiple hats of authority.

India’s nuclear and space programs were manifestations of a heterodox postcolonial modernity. The “technicist nation-state” of India that emerged, to quote historian Gyan Prakash, was not a mimicry of the colonial state but one that would attain modernity through science on its own terms.” Like the “hybridized concept” of the nation, which was modern and archaic at the same time, India’s pursuit of nuclear technologies represented a differentiated and pluralistic modernity.” The AECI/DAE imported technologies from industrially advanced foreign suppliers in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Indian scientists and engineers simultaneously improvised these technological objects by “fitting them” into Indian “society’s peculiar circumstances,” to quote political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj.”

The sequencing of development was such that it defied a linear transformation from traditional to modern. The nonlinear and contingent character of India’s nuclear program could be found in its many contradictions. One such incongruity was visually captured in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1966 photograph taken in Thumba, Kerala. The image showed a rocket engineer and a technician carrying the nose cone of a French Centaure rocket on a bicycle just before its launch. (See figure 4.1, chapter 4).

The Myth of Peaceful India

At the heart of the Indian nation-state lies the myth of a peaceful country built on Gandhian ideals of nonviolence. This myth ignores the territorial character of the Indian nation-state and its intrinsic intermestic violence. It plays into the self-serving ideology of the Hindu right that calls for a strong Hindurashtra (Hindu nation-state) to remedy the past of an emasculated, secular India led during its first fifty years by the Indian National Congress and its political successors. This myth partially explains the disparate memories of India’s nuclear explosion of May 1974, on the one hand, and the series of five nuclear weapon tests of May 1998, on the other. The former is remembered as a domestic political act, while the latter is perceived solely through the lens of national security.”

The secular Congress government led by Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, conducted the nuclear test of May 1974 in the midst of domestic political turmoil, calling it a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” By contrast, the nuclear tests of 1998 remain entrenched in public memory and major works of scholarship as the moment when India actually “went nuclear,” a policymaker’s shorthand for the development of nuclear weapons.’ The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—led government of Atal Behari Vajpayee conducted those five nuclear tests. Within weeks, Pakistan’s six nuclear tests made nuclear weapons an inescapable geopolitical reality in South Asia. Jaswant Singh from the Vajpayee government argued in a Foreign Affairs essay that the 1998 nuclear tests had inaugurated a brand-new era characterized by realpolitik in Indian foreign policy.” India had suffered, he claimed, under a half-century of “moralistic” stewardship of the secular Congress party, steeped in Nehruvian idealism.

The debate over India’s “strategic culture” in political and intellectual circles and among scholars of South Asia, which transpired in the late 1990s and early 2000s, reinforced Singh’s claim and reified the fiction of a peaceful India for much of its history after 1947.*° In the debate, the 1998 nuclear tests were framed as militaristic actions that transformed India’s strategic culture from pacifist Nehruvian idealism of the Cold War era into one characterized by Hindu nationalist militarism. The debate framed the discussion in terms of different geopolitical visions of India’s two main political parties: the secular “peaceful” Congress and the Hindu nationalist “militaristic” BJP.

The myth of peaceful India does not hold against the reality of violence of partition and the wars that crafted India’s borders with Pakistan and China. India’s geopolitical threats remain intermestic, rooted in the emergence of the national space itself, which political scientist Sankaran Krishna has called “cartographic anxiety.”*! The 1947 partition led to nearly two million deaths and displaced almost fourteen million people through communal violence and forced population transfers. Princely states like Travancore that refused to join the Indian Union were threatened with airstrikes, while Kashmir, Hyderabad, and Junagadh saw military and paramilitary action. French colonial territories experienced economic blockades and political violence for years.** Militarism took the form of the annexation of Goa and Sikkim and the suppression of separatist movements in Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, and elsewhere.

The Hindu nationalists’ ongoing assault on India’s political history has increased in recent years.*? The BJP government of Narendra Modi continues to resurrect the self-serving myth of a peaceful and weak India during the Cold War, when the secular Congress Party led the government. A closer look at India’s foreign policy in the Cold War is, therefore, urgent. It can help reveal that the 1974 nuclear test was similar to the 1998 tests, differing only in rhetoric and political context. Both were in part geopolitical responses to China and Pakistan, and in part representative of India’s anti-nonproliferation approach.

Anti-Nonproliferation and the Global Cold War

The term “proliferation” in biology refers to a rapid increase in the number of cells. It has a neutral medical status, but can also refer to cancerous growths. The term began to dominate the vocabulary of US defense intellectuals in the 1960s to indicate an increase in the number of countries with their own nuclear weapons or capabilities. Prior to that, “dissemination,” “diffusion,” “dispersal,” and “spread” were interchangeably used with “proliferation” in the context of nuclear weapons.** With the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), “proliferation” and “nonproliferation” became shorthand among US policymakers to indicate the perceived national security threat when foreign countries acquired their own nuclear weapons and US-led efforts to counter that threat, respectively.

The leaders of India’s nuclear program publicly opposed nonproliferation in its various forms, such as the NPT, IAEA safeguards, and strengthened bilateral safeguards, as contraventions of their freedom of action. The AECI/ DAE argued that its anti-nonproliferation stance was to protect the sovereignty of the Indian nation-state. India never signed the NPT on grounds that the treaty discriminated against those without nuclear weapons or the “nuclear have-nots.” This refusal has transformed the leaders of India’s nuclear program into national heroes till this day.”

Policymakers and scientific elites leading the nuclear program have been portrayed in the mainstream political discourse in India as those fighting a righteous battle for the nation against an unequal nuclear order led by the United States. This was especially in the context of India’s 1974 nuclear explosion, 1998 nuclear tests, and 2008 US-India civil nuclear agreement. Even though both superpowers were opposed to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by foreign countries, the United States has been far more proactive in formulating an expansive system of constraints that became the present-day global nonproliferation regime.

Ambassador V. C. Trivedi, India’s representative at the negotiations in Geneva that drafted the NPT, famously criticized the biased nature of the treaty as “atomic apartheid.” He argued that the NPT would restrict India’s free access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy by making technical assistance conditional upon joining the treaty. When historian Shane Maddock described US policies against nuclear weapons possession by other countries as “nuclear apartheid,” he was referring to Trivedi’s well-known remark. For Maddock, nuclear apartheid was based on the false presumption of “American moral and political guardianship over atomic technology.”*’

Even though the leaders of India’s nuclear program preferred US nuclear assistance owing to the superiority of US technology, they also cooperated with the Soviet Union to retain political leverage. Since the US government was not inclined to transfer technology and know-how, scientific elites at the helm of India’s nuclear program developed a robust relationship with France, a technologically advanced but recalcitrant US Cold War ally. They even explored nuclear aid to countries less technologically advanced than India, such as Brazil, Argentina, Libya, and Iran, irrespective of whether the countries had signed the NPT.

India’s anti-nonproliferation practice and its emphasis on equality and fairness resembled its nonaligned position in the Cold War. The world’s attention was first drawn to the soon-to-be independent Indian government and on Nehru in particular, with the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, held only months before India’s independence.** This was followed by the 1949 New Delhi Conference that drew global attention to ongoing Dutch colonial violence in Indonesia. The Asian-African Conference of April 1955, held in Bandung in Indonesia itself, was a watershed in the history of solidarity among recently decolonized countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. At Bandung, Nehru’s speech to the political committee was a tour de force. He articulated his government's foreign policy against Cold War bloc rivalry, when he famously declared, “We will defend ourselves with whatever arms and strength we have, and if we have no arms we will defend ourselves without arms... if we rely upon others, whatever great powers they might be, if we look to them for sustenance, then we are weak indeed.” ??

To many observers, India’s nonalignment was an ideological expression of the indignant pride of a postcolonial nation-state. Just as how the myth of peaceful India has led scholars to emphasize domestic politics as the driver of the country’s nuclear program, an ideological interpretation of India’s nonalignment and anti-nonproliferation stance has contributed to the prominence of a prestige-driven explanation of India’s nuclear program.”

The anti-nonproliferation position of the leaders of the nuclear program was neither moralistic nor ideological. It resulted from their pursuit of freedom of action. It was above all a pragmatic path, in which legality was key. While publicly opposing the NPT, those at the helm of the nuclear program made sure that they did not violate India’s legal obligations under the 1957 IAEA statute and the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. They continuously adapted the nuclear program through technopolitical choices to maneuver around restrictions of the nonproliferation regime and global Cold War politics.

India’s nonalignment and anti-nonproliferation stance were part of a pragmatic response to an asymmetrical world order. In a bipolar world divided between the communist East and the capitalist West, nonalignment brought new opportunities for Indian policymakers.*! They could, for instance, seek development assistance from both superpowers, as historian David Engerman has masterfully shown.” By invoking nonalignment and Afro-Asian solidarity, Indian leaders reformulated the Cold War through the lenses of decolonization and economic disparity between the Global South and the Global North. India’s dual-use nuclear program that aimed to fulfil national development goals, together with its anti-nonproliferation approach, was readily compatible with the global discourse of economic rights in the 1970s. The calls for a New International Economic Order echoed at the UN General Assembly in May 1974. Weeks later, the DAE conducted its underground nuclear explosion in Pokhran, claiming it to be an experiment for natural gas exploration.

Argument and Book Structure

India’s nuclear program has been the subject of several important historical studies, among which the contributions made by Itty Abraham, Robert Anderson, George Perkovich, and Jahnavi Phalkey have transformed our understanding of the subject matter.” Journalist Raj Chengappa’s account has filled gaps in our knowledge at a time when archival documents were not available, while physicist M. V. Ramana has drawn our attention to the economics of India’s nuclear energy enterprise.“ The revitalization of political and diplomatic histories of South Asia over the past decade and the declassification of a vast amount of primary sources in India and elsewhere have made it possible to write a comprehensive global story of India’s nuclear program during the Cold War.”

Social science accounts divide India’s nuclear program into distinct peaceful and military phases.*° The peaceful phase is said to have lasted from 1947 until the 1980s. The weaponization phase is said to have begun in the 1980s in response to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and consolidated after the nuclear tests of May 1998. This has relegated the formative years of India’s nuclear program (1940s—1980s) to a “prehistory” of the nuclear weapons project. Apart from Itty Abraham’s pioneering work on ambivalence and secrecy, the implicit scholarly treatment of national development and national security as mutually exclusive spheres, has further impeded a clear understanding of the early decades of the program.“ Furthermore, the nuclear program’s close association with the space program remains largely neglected. Moreover, India’s wellpublicized anti-nonproliferation approach has led to numerous studies of its ideological opposition to the nonproliferation regime but occluded analyses of the nuclear program’s global and transnational dimensions. “°

This book fills a lacuna in the scholarship by making three main arguments. First, India’s nuclear program was a dual-use endeavor, simultaneously serving civilian and military ends, not because of the nature of nuclear technologies, but owing to deliberate plans and decisions undertaken by the AECI/ DAE. The energy program did not develop into a weapons program over time, but the nuclear program itself was conceived as both from the onset. The program’s dual-use characteristics were manifest in its technologies, infrastructure, training, and, above all, foreign partnerships. The deliberate duality in the nuclear program was the outcome of the leaders’ pursuit of freedom of action, which itself resulted from sociotechnical imaginaries of the nation and the role of fission in it. From the program’s inception, ploughshares were swords, and swords were ploughshares.

In practice, the Janus-faced nuclear program functioned as a hyperdiversification device. The nuclear program, which was a collection of multifarious technological objects serving development and security goals, attracted multiple foreign partners. If one partner withdrew from cooperation, the AECI/ DAE could easily turn to another. Inside the country, the polyvalent nuclear program enforced consensus among citizens and domestic political coalitions in support of the program. To oppose ploughshares was to oppose national development. To oppose swords was to oppose national security. Taking a stand against both was defying the nation itself. The intentional duality of the nuclear program thus checked dissent within the democratic polity by controlling the discourse on modernity. The result was the coproduction of a large dual-use nuclear program with little democratic accountability and a society that tolerated the risks, flaws, and failures of the program.”