Description
Book SynopsisIndia''s nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India''s nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program''s civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India''s leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.
The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear pro
Trade Review
This book provides not only a compelling history of India's nuclear program, but also new insights into decolonization, independence movements, and the Cold War in developing nations. It's an engrossing, well-researched history of India's nuclear ambitions.
* Kirkus Reviews *
Ploughshares and Swords is an immensely valuable work that builds upon and comprehensively enhances prior scholarship. It represents an important addition to the new generation of nuclear scholarship, an addition that deserves to have a lasting influence on the field.
* Diplomatic History *
Sarkar skillfully shows how Indian institution builders consistently made "polyvalent technopolitical choices to keep the nuclear weapons option perpetually open" through their ambiguity about whether nuclear development advanced civilian or military purposes.
* Choice *
Ploughshares & Swords is a major contribution to our understanding of India's nuclear programme, backed by multi-sited, plurilingual research. Sarkar has done more than anyone so far to unpack the geopolitical underpinnings of this nuclearisation processThe result is a book that is as rich in its argumentation as it is deep in empirical detail – and, to boot, thoroughly engrossing.
* Cold War History *
Indian antinuclear circles may also find much validation in this book. While the Indian nuclear establishment is known for flouting domestic laws, Sarkar reveals how it meticulously followed the letter of the international law, if not the spirit, as it developed its testing capabilities. At the same time, it used international rule following to deftly evade further probing from domestic politicians and bureaucrats seeking to hold India's nuclear establishment democratically accountable.
* Technology & Culture *
Drawing on extensive interdisciplinary research, this book is a useful addition to the literature on India's nuclear programme that powerfully underscores the importance of its subject matter.
* LSE Review of Books *
The book is an essential reference to understanding the complex nuclear histories of India and its regional competitors.
* Arms Control Today *
Ploughshares & Swords is a major contribution to our understanding of India's nuclear programme, backed by multi-sited, plurilingual research. Sarkar has done more than anyone so far to unpack the geopolitical underpinnings of this nuclearisation process – notably by highlighting the interplay between international and domestic challenges to Indian territori- ality. The result is a book that is as rich in its argumentation as it is deep in empirical detail – and, to boot, thoroughly engrossing.
* Cold War History *
This is the work that scholars of India's nuclear program have been waiting for; it will be required reading for historians of several different fields – foreign relations, science and technology, and decolonization – to name just a few.
* Toynbee Prize *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Freedom of Action
Part One: World War and Decolonization
1. Atomic Earths and State-Making, 1940s–1948
2. Radium to Reactors, 1948–1953
Part Two: Cold and Hot Wars
3. Nuclear Marketplace Opens for Business, 1953–1962
4. Plutonium, Power Reactors, and Space Projects, 1962–1964
5. The Plowshare Loophole, 1964–1970
Part Three: Unmaking and Making of India
6. Fractured Worlds, 1970–1974
7. Explosion and Fallout, 1974–1980s
Epilogue: The Anti-Dissent Machine
