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BOOKS
Nuclear
Sutra
More banalities
on the bomb
By
Amitabh Mattoo
India'sNuclear
Security
Ed by Raju G.C. Thomas & Amit Gupta
Sage
Price: Rs 475
Pages: 323 |
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India's
nuclear programme and Zen philosophy share an intriguing epistemological
quality. Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.
Much of what gets written on India's nuclear policy, therefore, is no
more than reasoned speculation. Lack of hard information has not prevented,
however, the growth of a nuclear publishing industry. There has been a
particular proliferation of publications since the May 1998 nuclear tests,
one of the few occasions on which the Brahmins controlling India's nuclear
weapons programme were forced to reveal their secret mantras to the world.
But what was made available were just a few shlokas, while the bulk of
the nuclear Vedanta remains inaccessible to all but a few of the initiated.
In other words, while a couple of scholars may have cracked the nuclear
Brahma sutras, the Upanishads and the
Bhagavad
Gita of India's atomic programme continue to be beyond the reach of the
majority of security analysts.
Writings
on India's nuclear programme, therefore, follow a largely normative agenda.
They focus on what "should be" rather than "what is".
India's Nuclear Security ambitiously seeks to pay attention to both. This
edited collection of essays focuses, therefore, not just on the future,
but also on India's current capabilities and the reasons behind nuclearisation.
Like most
edited volumes, the chapters are of uneven quality. Surprisingly, however,
the essays that explore the historical period are better written and more
convincing even though they rely essentially on secondary sources. This
may well be because the non-proliferation agenda had so dominated academic
scholarship on India's nuclear policy that little attention was paid to
the country's emergence as a nuclear power. Few had imagined that Delhi
would demonstrate the chutzpah to defy the non-proliferation regime.
In that
sense this book represents a turning point, reflected particularly in
Raju Thomas's article. Thomas, who was once one of the strongest proponents
of India signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty, argues that India's nuclear
deterrent may today be a necessary evil in a unipolar world "where
an unrivalled US-led NATO is expanding and threatening to intervene in
the internal affairs of sovereign states".
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