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| April 24, 2000 | ||
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| India's
Neutron Dance
A lucid account of Bharat's quest for nuclear shakti By Pramit Pal Chaudhuri WEAPONS OF PEACE
In this book, the story of the bomb is personified by Raja Ramanna. Among the first recruits of Homi Bhabha, he cast a solo vote in favour of the 1974 nuclear tests. And pleaded with every prime minister afterwards to hold more tests. But the real meat lies in describing India's tackling the more demanding task of designing a delivery system. The alpha male in this is, of course, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. His main talent was not science but get up and go. Kalam's great accomplishment was ending the bitter rivalry between India's civilian and defence rocketry programmes. Usefully, there are chapters on the abortive and forgotten Valiant and Devil missile projects. The history of Agni and Prithvi are discussed threadbare. The missile story is kept alive by bringing to life personalities involved. The bitter rivalry between Ramanna and Homi Sethna could match the more famous Robert Oppenheimer-Edward Teller feud. Indira Gandhi and Vajpayee get all the laurels because they allowed tests, but almost every prime minister played a role. Jawaharlal Nehru set the tone by insisting on maintaining a nuclear option, even warning Bhabha to ignore public postures about outlawing nuclear weapons. Lal Bahadur Shastri paved the way for the 1974 test. Rajiv Gandhi issued "orders for India to have minimum number of bombs ready within a time frame". V.P. Singh upgraded the crude command and control system. Through extensive interviews with key players, the author dissipates many of the question marks hanging over India's atomic drama. P.V. Narasimha Rao's supposed attempt at a nuclear test in 1995 was nothing more than the draining of a flooded bomb shaft in Pokhran. If anything, H.D. Deve Gowda came much closer to holding a test than Rao did. Vajpayee grasped the nettle for a number of reasons. One was a belief India's historical defeats were because of inferior weapons. Ramanna warned him a generation of Indian scientists was about to retire. There was also the approaching September 1999 review of the test ban treaty. The last straw was Pakistan's testing of the Ghauri missile. In the end, Vajpayee said, "There was no need for much thought. We just have to do it." This book is disproportionately a scientists' narrative. The diplomatic side is barely mentioned. Indian thinking, or the lack thereof, on overall strategy regarding use of nuclear weapons gets barely a word. But this is a story well told, in a style readable and interesting to the layman. Mentioned in passing, but not really digested, is the fact that India and Pakistan have taken to brandishing the bomb at each other since the late 1980s. During Kargil, both sides kept their nuclear arsenals in a state of advanced readiness, India keeping Prithvis and one Agni ready for launch. India has spent five decades in quest of nuclear arms. It now needs to achieve nuclear safety -- and quickly. New Releases Attendance1999 On the Cultural Front India The Shadow of the Tiger and Other
Plays Fengshui A. D. Shroff Mewar: The World's Longest Serving
Dynasty A potentially good book on nuclear India that goes off on a tangent By Subramanian Swamy INDIA'S There are many books that have been written on India's nuclear bomb, but George Perkovich's may perhaps be the most exhaustive of all so far. One can perceive that from the sheer size of the book of 597 pages. I am not terribly sure, however, whether scholarship in the field requires today an encyclopedia of India's nuclear power establishment and events, especially if it is going to cost a rupee a page. What the field urgently requires is a treatise on what India should do and what should be the content of our nuclear doctrine. But first about the book. Perkovich, viewing the past in three phases -- 1947-74, 1975-95, and 1995 to date -- poses three specific questions. First, why did India develop its nuclear weapon capability when it did and the way it did? Second, what are the factors that keep India from stopping or reversing its nuclear weapons programme? Third, what effect has the US had on India's nuclear intentions and capabilities? As an Indian I do not find these interesting questions. They may be of great interest to a foreigner who never thought India could explode a bomb and is now intrigued to find out how we can be stopped from going further. The international establishment led by the US has just about co-opted China and is reluctant to re-do the same exercise so soon after and that too for a cranky, unpredictable and billion strong India. Now before posing what I think are interesting questions to ask for an Indian, it would be fair on my part as a reviewer to state what answers Perkovich obtains from his mammoth efforts to collate the research that he has done. There the reader will be disappointed because the author loses his way in the voluminous material he has assembled. This is a serious lapse in scholarship for a book of this price and size. But wading through what the author himself concedes as his "narrative (which) chronicles the important developments, debates, and decisions affecting India's nuclear weapons policy from 1947 through 1998", I decipher that the answer to the first question is that India had no coherent nuclear weapons policy or an institutionalised system of analysing and posing concrete policy options before the political authority. India's nuclear capability grew very much like our software capability: thanks to Bhabha and his chelas, the Trombay group was a law unto itself and their brain power fully exploited the insulation they enjoyed thanks to Jawaharlal Nehru's vanity and our society's ambivalence, fluctuating between the yearning to recover our ancient pre-eminence and the Jesus Christ complex. The answer to the second question appears to be that certain domestic factors -- such as the public perception nuclear weapons symbolise India's prowess -- and not security considerations will prevent reversing the nuclear weapons programme. As for the third question, the author suggests the US has managed to slow India down on its path to nuclear weapons power status. The book is written well, although the author has an indefensible fascination for trivia. I certainly think the more interesting questions are: Who and what was responsible for India missing the nuclear bus in the 1960s, when acquiring and demonstrating just before or just after China had international and strategic value? Why do we want to demonstrate our nuclear capability now when the world is definitely moving towards disarmament, for furthering which we have expended so much effort in the past five decades? Is it in our strategic interest now to consider trade offs between renouncing further nuclear testing with say a permanent membership of the UN Security Council? And answers? Well, wait for my book. Let me add though that as a member of the original nuclear lobby along with Raj Krishna and Sisir Gupta, which had in the 1960s smashed the Indian Uncle Toms' oppressive view that we couldn't, should not and wouldn't go nuclear, I now consider the nuclear weapon as the most dangerously useless device around. |
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India's
quest for nuclear weapons is associated in the common mind with Indira
Gandhi and, laterally, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The real story is more
complex. It was pursued along many paths and many other people were
involved. The two grand trunk roads were building the nuclear explosives
and the missiles to carry them. There were cul de sacs and detours aplenty
along the way.