Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War

by Jayita Sarkar

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501764400
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2022
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.06(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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

Like any excellent work of scholarship, one of the strengths of Sarkar's book is that it points to many fruitful research directions that other scholars can pursue. Ploughshares and Swords will no doubt serve as a touchstone for scholarship on India's nuclear history going forward.

The Robert Jervis International Security Studies F H-Diplo

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

2022-05-20
A scholar examines India’s nuclear program in this debut book.

An assistant professor of international relations at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, Sarkar ranks among the world’s foremost experts on the history of India’s boisterous relationship with nuclear technology. In this volume, the culmination of years of international research, she offers readers a succinct history and compelling analysis of India’s nuclear program. Written chronologically, the book is divided into three parts, with the first section providing historical information on the intersection of India’s nuclear ambitions with the nation’s newfound independence in the 1940s. Part 2 explores the role of India’s nuclear expansion in the context of the Cold War, and the final section looks at the program’s history since the 1970s. In addition to presenting a well-written, concise history, the volume delivers an analysis that challenges prevailing narratives about India’s broader history since independence. For instance, the work dispels the “myth of peaceful India” built on “Gandhian ideals of nonviolence,” emphasizing right-wing demands for a strong Hindu nation-state. The book also highlights the presence of anti-nuclear activists as well as their encounters with “spectacular state violence.” This innovative analysis is backed by impressive research that effectively utilizes both Western and Indian archival sources, demonstrates a firm command of the academic literature, and gives readers nearly 70 pages of endnotes and bibliographic material. And while there is much here that will intrigue scholars in Sarkar’s field, the volume’s accessible writing will appeal to readers without a niche academic specialization. The book’s engaging style is complemented by an ample assortment of maps, charts, historical photographs, and other images. Although it’s partly inspired by the author’s own upbringing in India and her vivid memories of the country’s series of nuclear tests in 1998 that “shook South Asia,” the thorough account ends rather abruptly in the ’80s, presenting only a brief commentary on events since the ’90s. Despite this omission, the 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.

An engrossing, well-researched history of India’s nuclear ambitions.

Kirkus Reviews

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 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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

The book is an essential reference to understanding the complex nuclear histories of India and its regional competitors.

-- "Arms Control Today"

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"

From the Publisher

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications.

New Books Network