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scientific prowess, and in spite of political upheaval and economic uncertainty, the PRC had joined the world’s nuclear club within nine years of deciding to do so. The nation had had critical help before 1960. But Lewis and Xue emphasize China’s determination to succeed on its own. ‘The scientific wonder of fission and its potential’, they write, ‘enraptured and drew to it men and women of China just as much as it did all attached to that [scientific] fraternity. That this must be said derives more from American parochialism than from anything special about China.’ By the end of the twentieth century, China had some 450 nuclear warheads, most of them based on land, though only twenty or so of the long-range (ICBM) variety. And, in the wake of the nuclear test by India, in 1974, China helped Pakistan go nuclear with advice, blueprints, and a supply of weapons-grade uranium.8

6. India: Status, religion, and masculinity

India’s decision to build an atomic weapon was inspired, in part, by China’s success, and in part by fears that rival Pakistan would seek a device of its own and threaten India with it. Like Israel, India tried to mask its strategic intentions and nuclear capabilities, using ambiguity or opacity to leave its adversaries uncertain whether India could, if it wished, strike with atomic weapons. Nor was security India’s only cause. Like South Africa and others, India knew that there were strategic limitations on the use of nuclear weapons—what, for example, does one do with atomic bombs when the Pakistanis infiltrate the mountains on India’s northwest border? India also sought nuclear capability as a sign of status, especially in the light of a recent colonial past that lingered in the form of Western denigration of Indian science and the anxiety of Indian scientists that the scornful Westerners might be right. The Western sponsors of ‘nonproliferation’, according to George Perkovich, seemed to replicate the pattern of colonial domination in their insistence that only those who had already tested nuclear devices ought to possess such things. Third World latecomers, like India, were unwelcome in the nuclear club. Yet the Indians’ determination to prove themselves scientifically and technologically was complicated by the nation’s rhetorical claims to a moral high ground internationally, where conflict was to be shunned or forestalled by reason, discussion, mediation, and finally compromise. In the light of Mohandas Gandhi’s insistence on the pacific resolution of disputes, India’s avid pursuit of atomic weapons looked unseemly.

The men who made decisions about India’s nuclear program for roughly the first two decades of the nation’s independent existence were Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, and Homi Bhabha, who was named by Nehru in 1948 to head India’s newly established Atomic Energy Commission. Nehru had worked closely to achieve independence with both Gandhi and other, more coldly pragmatic leaders affiliated with the Congress Party, and, while he had in him some of the Mahatma’s moral distaste for war and its weapons—he called for ‘neutralism’ in the budding Cold War and came across, thought Eleanor Roosevelt, as ‘sensitive and gentle’—he could equally be toughminded, especially when he thought the security of his people might be at risk. Nehru also believed in the need for scientific progress, and in the sponsorship of science by the state, though he warned that science was Janus-faced, with a ‘destructive side and a constructive, creative side’. Homi Bhabha was a brilliant and enterprising man who came to Cambridge in 1927 to study engineering but switched to physics, working with Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, and P. M. S. Blackett and gaining his Ph.D. in 1935. He spent time in labs across Europe, including those of Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, returning to India in 1939, whence the war found and stranded him. He persuaded the well-endowed Sir Dorabji Tata trust to fund a school for nuclear research, with himself as its head. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research