Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War
India'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 program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.
Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.
Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
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Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War
India'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 program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.
Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.
Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
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Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War
India'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 program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.
Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.
Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow. Follow her on X @DrJSarkar.
Table of Contents
Introduction: 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
What People are Saying About This
Roxanne Panchasi
Challenging binaries of peaceful and military, development and security, in narratives of India's nuclear past and present, Jayita Sakar makes a vital contribution to global Cold War studies. Understanding India's nuclear and space programs as imbricated technological projects, Ploughshares and Swords is at once a history of decolonization and its legacies, visions of 'modernity,' and the complexities of geopolitics.
Nicholas Miller
Ploughshares and Swords should be required reading for those interested in India's nuclear program and nuclear history more broadly. Sarkar convincingly shows that the desire for freedom of action has powerfully shaped India's nuclear decisions for decades.
Srinath Raghavan
This book is the first history of India's nuclear program that is truly global in scope. No previous historian of the topic has cast their net as widely or come up with archival materials that are quite as striking. An outstanding international and transnational history.
Gyan Prakash
Ploughshares and Swords brilliantly demonstrates that India's nuclear and space programs were interconnected and designed as instruments of both technopolitics and geopolitics since their inception. They were always planned to be of dual use: economic modernity and national security, peaceful and military, domestic and international. A splendid achievement.
David Holloway
Sarkar has given us a very revealing analysis of India's nuclear program during the Cold War, exploring its civil and military dimensions as well as its domestic and international contexts with due attention to their ambiguities and complexities. An excellent book.
John Krige
By drawing on a fine collection of sources, Sarkar demonstrates how nuclear material and technology were used as strategic assets in Indian nation-building and national security. An important contribution to our understanding of India's space and nuclear programs.
Lorenz Lüthi
Jayita Sarkar takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the world's political, scientific, and business networks that nurtured India's dual-use nuclear program. Deeply researched and forcefully argued, this book compels us to radically rethink conventional wisdom about India's nuclear project.