Ploughshares and Swords.
India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War
Cornell University Press, 2022
Honourable Mention, 2023 ISA Global Development Studies Book Award
Endorsements
An engrossing, well-researched history of India’s nuclear ambitions.— Kirkus
Highly recommended.
— Choice
It will be the work on Indian atomic energy for the foreseeable future.
— Toynbee Prize
A splendid achievement.
— Gyan Prakash, Princeton University, author of Emergency Chronicles
An outstanding international and transnational history.
— Srinath Raghavan, Ashoka University, author of Fierce Enigmas
This book compels us to radically rethink conventional wisdom about India's nuclear project.
— Lorenz Lüthi, McGill University, author of Cold Wars
It is at once a history of decolonization and its legacies, visions of 'modernity,' and the complexities of geopolitics.
— Roxanne Panchasi, Simon Fraser University, author of Future Tense
A required reading for those interested in India's nuclear program and nuclear history more broadly.
— Nicholas Miller, Dartmouth College, author of Stopping the Bomb
An excellent book.
— David Holloway, Stanford University, author of Stalin and the Bomb
About the Book
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.
About the Author
Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative.
Website
Cover Story
If you are wondering about the book's cover art, please read on.
Galen Passen and I worked together to create the artwork for the book's cover in 2020. The design team at Cornell University Press did a marvelous job readapting it as the cover for this book in 2022. Working with a collage artist was a fascinating experience, forcing me to visually reconstruct the idea of my book. Through Galen's remarkable talent and after several rounds of brainstorming, we came up with what became the book cover.
The landmass that drops from the right is the map of south Bombay (present-day Mumbai), where the India’s Department of Atomic Energy and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research are located, thousands of miles from India’s capital, New Delhi. If you know the cartography of the area, you can locate Trombay, where the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre is— the nerve centre of India's nuclear program. The landmass is filled with a collage of archival materials in multiple languages, representing India’s national nuclear program as a globally sourced endeavor.
The figure to the left is an altered version of the United Nations sculpture in New York, “Let us beat our swords into ploughshares,” which has inspired the title of the book. The figure raises one sword while beating the other into a ploughshare, representing the duality in India’s nuclear program, which the book explores.
The blurred backdrop is a partial map of the world, showing several places that India received nuclear technologies and know-how from, cutting across the Cold War divide.
