Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. xvi, 282 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$25.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781501765018.
There are two broad narratives about India’s nuclear program: one asserts that it was conceived as an entirely peaceful and civilian program but was compelled to add a weapon dimension following China’s 1964 nuclear weapon test, and the absence of reliable security guarantees from other nuclear-weapon states, especially the United States and the Soviet Union. The other, and more widely accepted, narrative argues that India’s nuclear program was designed to be dual use, with a built-in “weapon option,” right from its inception in the 1940s.
Jayita Sarkar’s book, as the title unabashedly proclaims, firmly endorses the latter narrative. Though it is now a well-ploughed furrow, this volume, with the help of recently declassified primary sources, fills crucial gaps and makes a significant contribution to better understanding the internal and external dynamics behind India’s nuclear and missile programs.
The empirical volume chronologically spans the time from the 1940s to the 1980s and makes three key arguments: first, right from the beginning, India’s nuclear program was deliberately designed to serve civilian and military ends; thus, “ploughshares were swords, and swords were ploughshares” (14). The latter reciprocity is particularly noteworthy as the weapon capability was often used to shield the failures of the civilian nuclear energy program.
Second, the geopolitical dimensions of the program were apparent in the “intermestic nature of territorial threats and their entanglements with the global Cold War” (14), as illustrated through the 1962 Sino-Indian war, the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, and Sikkim’s annexation in 1974, as well as the internal Naxalite movement. It examines how New Delhi, along with the two superpowers and China, responded to these events and the impact of this on India’s programs.
Third, India also pursued a dual-use space program, “while keeping space research purposefully separate from the nuclear program and defense laboratories” (14–15). This is debatable given that key personnel (such as A. P. J. Abdul Kalam) moved back and forth between the Defence Research and Development Organization and the civilian Indian Space Research Organization, and were involved in both the civilian launch vehicle and missile programs. Indeed, as the author admits, this separation was, at best, “a veil of false distinction” (125). Once the missile program had matured enough to be mated with nuclear weapons, the veil was dropped.
Curiously, the volume downplays yet another of its significant contributions: how India’s leadership and technocrats were able to anticipate and circumvent the various hurdles and exploit the loopholes in the evolving non-proliferation regime to procure the necessary technical wherewithal to secure and advance the nuclear and missile programs. Indeed, the book offers a rich trove of detailed episodes that underline how India was able to collaborate with other nuclear weapons states (except China) and nuclear suppliers despite (or perhaps because of) the Cold War divide and maintain its autonomy of action. Significantly, despite the present dispensation’s call for Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan (Self-reliant India Campaign), this Indian approach, with all its incumbent risks, is very much in evidence even in today’s post-Cold War multipolar world.
In two notable chapters, “Plutonium and Power Reactors, 1962–1964” and “The Plowshare Loophole, 1964–1970,” Sarkar details how India’s technocrats were able to acquire the APSARA reactor from Britain, the CIRUS reactor from Canada (with heavy water supplied by the United States), get the design and technology for the PURNIMA fast neutron reactor from the Soviet Union, and the breeder reactor technology from France, while keeping the pathway to weaponization open. This was despite British and US assessments by the mid-1960s that India was well on the path of acquiring nuclear weapon capability (107–112).
Along with managing the external Cold War, the nuclear and missile technocrats also won the “institutional cold wars within India” (127). In a telling incident, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) deftly warded off an effort by the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Education to get involved in a collaboration with the Soviet Union to discuss experimental high-energy physics. Indeed, the absolute dominance of the nuclear weaponeers—of not just the weapons and delivery systems, but also their likely deployment and use—is evident in the almost complete absence of any reference to the role of the military in the book’s exhaustive research; the only reference is to the 61st Engineer Regiment, which was tasked to prepare the shaft for the 1974 test (172–173).
In fact, this glaring absence is evident in a 1966 interaction between Vikram Sarabhai (then chief of the DAE) and the visiting US Committee on International Studies and Arms Control cited by Sarkar. Not only is there no military official present at the meeting, but Sarabhai engages the visitors on a discussion on the “possibility of mining the Himalayan passes with radioactive waste” (110), even though it appears unlikely that this was at the behest of the military establishment.
While the volume does an excellent job of strengthening the “ploughshares and swords” narrative, it also leaves several unanswered questions. For instance, why did the US and the Soviet Union put a date for testing that would accommodate China in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) but not India? On the other hand, why was India’s 1974 nuclear test never raised in the UN Security Council (as were the 1998 tests)? Finally, did India’s desire for autonomy come at the cost of being part of the NPT? And was it worth it? Hopefully, in the future Sarkar and other scholars will address these questions.
Waheguru Pal Sidhu
New York University, New York