The ambivalence of nuclear histories

Osiris

Volumn 21, Issue , 2006, Pages 49-65

  Abraham, Itty ^a  

^a East West Center   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748614892     PISSN: 03697827     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/507135     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, 1989).
2. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986), 599, 734, 740-1.
3. Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York, 1946), 76,
4. cited in Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (cit. n. 1), 7.
5. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, 1994), 154-66, on 161.
6. John Lewis Gaddis, What We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997), 103-7.
7. Scott D. Sagan, "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search of a Bomb," International Security 21 (Winter 1996/97): 73-85.
8. See also Stephen M. Meyer, The Dynamics of Nuclear Proliferation (Chicago, 1984);
9. Bradley A. Thayer, "The Causes of Nuclear Proliferation and the Utility of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime," Security Studies 4 (1995): 463-519;
10. Tanya Ogilvie-White, "Is There a Theory of Nuclear Proliferation?" Nonproliferation Review 4 (Fall 1996): 43-60.
11. Sagan, "Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?" (cit. n.6), 55. It should be noted that Sagan uses the term "norms" in three distinct ways: as an ideational-symbolic form, as a form of international mimicry, and as a reflexive constraint on autonomous actions.
12. Ibid., 85 (my italics).
13. Using "control" rather than the more common "proliferation" reflects our understanding of proliferation as "political language," "Proliferation" indexes an international-legal discourse in which five countries are given a special status as "nuclear weapon states" and the intent of the law is to prevent other states from acquiring the same de jure status. For other examples, see Murray Edelman, Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail (New York, 1977).
14. Steve Smith, "The United States and the Discipline of International Relations: 'Hegemonic Country, Hegemonic Discipline,'" International Studies Review 4 (Summer 2002): 67-85.
15. That a techno-political event is only a "demonstration" is an official hedge. It should be taken to mean a technical capability to do something that (a) stops short of defining national policy and (b) provides cover to the technologists in case of failure. Central to the meaning of the word are the various audiences - domestic and foreign - who are presumed to be seeking unambiguous meaning from this event.
16. Avner Cohen and Benjamin Frankel, "Opaque Nuclear Proliferation," in Opaque Nuclear Proliferation: Methodological and Policy Implications, ed. Benjamin Frankel (London, 1991), 14-44.
17. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York, 1998), ix.
18. Most important, Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik,South Asia on a Short Fuse (Delhi, 2000);
19. M. V. Ramana and C. Rammanohar Reddy, eds., Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (Delhi, 2002);
20. George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley, 1999);
21. Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India's Quest to be a Nuclear Power (Delhi, 2000).
22. Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (cit. n. 14), 226-433.
23. Chengappa, Weapons of Peace, 291-305;
24. Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb, 293-9. (Both cit. n. 14.) Both countries recognized each other's nuclear capabilities no later than December 1988. This date marks the signing of the first bilateral agreement between India and Pakistan not to attack each other's nuclear facilities.
25. Ashok Kapur in Pokhran and Beyond (Delhi, 2002) asserts that Indira Gandhi wanted to test in 1982, but as Perkovich notes, other than the formal request by the nuclear scientists, the rest of the story (Gandhi's agreement to go ahead that was rescinded after twenty-four hours) has never been fully corroborated.
26. India's Nuclear Bomb (cit. n. 14), 242-4.
27. More reliably, Raj Chengappa in Weapons of Peace (cit. n. 14), 390-5, reports that in 1995 Prime Minister Narasimha Rao ordered a series of tests that were canceled following internal disagreements and U.S. pressure.
28. Of his two successors, Atal Behari Vajpayee also ordered tests, but his government fell in thirteen days, while H. D. Deve Gowda felt that other matters were more pressing than nuclear tests, even though the test site was ready and explosives were in place. Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb, 375-6.
29. One example of these flows is the adoption of highly restrictive procedures originally developed for the Manhattan Project to guard institutional secrets in a variety of settings quite removed from U.S. national security. See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, 1998), 154-77.
30. This issue is explicitly recognized but not fully addressed in Benjamin Frankel and Zachary S. Davis, "Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Theory and Policy," in The Proliferation Puzzle: Why Nuclear Weapons Spread (And What Results), ed. Zachary S. Davis and Benjamin Frankel (London, 1993), 2.
31. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 131.
32. Ibid., 132
33. Another amazing parallel across practically all national narratives of nuclear energy (not developed here) is the figure of the "Father of the [put country name here] Nuclear Program"-a male scientist-bureaucrat-politician who is able to achieve great success in all three domains.
34. See Atomic Scientists of Chicago, The Atomic Bomb: Facts and Implications (Chicago, 1946),18, for a list of the key publications announcing the discovery of fission and the diverse nationalities of their authors.
35. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb (cit. n. 2).
36. John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford, 1988), 44-5
37. Lawrence S. Scheinman, Atomic Energy Policy in France Under the Fourth Republic (Princeton, 1965).
38. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (cit. n. 4).
39. Astrid Forland, "Norway's Nuclear Odyssey: From Optimistic Proponent to Nonproliferator," The Nonproliferation Review 4 (Winter 1997): 1-16.
40. Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (cit. n. 13).
41. Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, vol. 1, Policy Making (New York, 1974).
42. Itty Abraham, Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State (London, 1998), 84-5.
43. Nehru, "Apsara," from Jawaharlal Nehru's Speeches, vol. 3, March 1953-August 1957 (Delhi, 1958), 504-5.
44. Internal memo, n.d., File AB6/1250, Public Records Office, U.K.
45. Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, 2nd sess., vol. 5 (Delhi, 1948), 3319-20.
46. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (cit. n. 4), 78.
47. Ibid., 48.
48. Govind Swarup, interview by author, Washington, D.C., Oct. 15, 1995.
49. Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 77-102.
50. Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1971; repr., Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 200-86.
51. Quoted in Nehru, "The Hydrogen Bomb," in Speeches (cit. n. 32), 248.
52. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "The Atom Bomb, America, and Japan," originally published in Harijan, July 7, 1946. Reprinted in The Gandhi Reader: A Source Book of His Life and Writings, ed. Homer A. Jack (New York, 1956), 349-50.
53. Weart, Nuclear Fear (cit. n. 37), 162.
54. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 225.
55. Weart, Nuclear Fear (cit. n. 37), 158-9.
56. Ibid., 160.
57. Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 166.
58. Weart, Nuclear Fear (cit. n. 37), 165.
59. Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (cit. n. 13), 11, 353 n. 9.
60. Nehru, "Control of Nuclear Energy," Speech in the Lok Sabha, May 10, 1954, Speeches (cit. n. 32), 255.
61. Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd ser., vol. 28, 1 Feb-31 May 1955 (Delhi, 2001), 31.
62. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 39.
63. Scheinman, Atomic Energy Policy in France (cit. n. 26), 75.
64. Nehru, Selected Works (cit. n. 50), 30.
65. Abraham, Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb (cit. n. 31).
66. Nehru, Selected Works (cit. n. 50), 29 (my italics).
67. Ibid., 26 (my italics).