The Untold Global Backstory of India's Nuclear Program

Podcast Episode

The Untold Global Backstory of India's Nuclear Program

Jayita Sarkar uncovers how India built its nuclear program from the ground up and challenges the conventional wisdom that India's nuclear ambitions were an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats.

By Milan Vaishnav and Jayita Sarkar

Published on Mar 21, 2023

India's nuclear program is often conceived as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. But a new book by the scholar Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, challenges the conventional wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years.

It is a story about nuclear ambiguity, Cold War geopolitics, territorial ambition, and visionary engineers and scientists. Jayita, who is a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative, joins Milan on the show this week to talk more about her book.

The two discuss the elite coterie of scientists and engineers responsible for India’s nuclear program, the myth of India’s peaceful, non-violent rise, and the many global inputs to India’s nuclear ambitions. Plus, the two discuss the surprising roots of India’s controversial 1974 nuclear tests and the country’s struggles to fulfill its nuclear energy potential at home.

“Southern Asia's Nuclear Future with Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.
[Open-access] Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.

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