Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [186]
During the parliamentary debate over the creation of India’s AEC in 1948, Nehru was candid about India’s purposes. While he emphasized the benefits of nuclear energy, he pointedly told critics that it was impossible to ‘distinguish between’ peaceful and military uses of the atom where basic research was concerned. He expressed ‘hope that our outlook in regard to this atomic energy is going to be a peaceful one’, but he did not categorically rule out weapons work. Nehru’s and Bhabha’s reputations were nevertheless such that other countries trusted them to stay away from bomb development, or at least from proclaiming that they were building bombs. During the 1950s India got help constructing and fueling reactors from Britain (the Apsara research reactor, Asia’s first, which went critical in 1956), and from Canada and the United States, which, respectively, built and supplied with heavy water the CIRUS reactor, online as of 1960. The Indians assured Ottawa and Washington that CIRUS products ‘would be used only for peaceful purposes’. In the meantime, however, Bhabha planned a complex nearby—all this activity took place in and around Bombay—that would extract weapons-grade plutonium from CIRUS’s fuel rods. Like the South Africans, Nehru and Bhabha spoke of producing Peaceful Nuclear Explosives, and in this they were never discouraged by the United States.
American fantasies about PNEs—using nuclear devices to ‘change the earth’s surface to suit us’, as Edward Teller proclaimed in 1957—help explain the willingness with which the United States provided both South Africa and India with nuclear equipment and information, and the apparent calm with which the Americans regarded India’s nuclear opacity. The Americans also, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hoped to monopolize India’s monazite sands, a possible source of nuclear fuel. And the Americans understood, despite any number of policy differences with Nehru, India’s delicate strategic situation in South Asia. In September 1961 George McGhee, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, suggested to his boss, Dean Rusk, that the United States might assist India to develop an atomic bomb and thereby ‘beat Communist China to the punch’. Rusk rejected the idea, but less than five years later he advised President Lyndon Johnson to take ‘no dramatic steps to discourage the Indians from starting a nuclear weapons program’, and Johnson did not. Nor did other nations place obstacles in India’s way. Meanwhile, China attacked India following a border dispute in 1962 and detonated its device at Lop Nur in 1964, and India and Pakistan fought two limited but sharp wars, in 1965 and 1971. Yet India did not test a bomb until 1974.
The reason for the delay, as Perkovich has it, is that residual moral doubts about producing a nuclear weapon, combined with a lack of official conviction that a bomb would enhance India’s security and (perhaps as a result of these two factors) a haphazard decisionmaking process concerning nuclear affairs, slowed momentum toward a decision to test. But official indecision never affected the determination of the nuclear scientific community to push forward. Like their counterparts elsewhere, Indian scientists wanted to test themselves, solve problems, and advance their status, nationally and in the world. Homi Bhabha had reminded delegates at the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955 that scientists were a global community that ‘stood above history and politics’ and that they must never be ‘restrained by national boundaries’ and jealousies. (Bhabha died in a plane crash in early 1966.) Indian physicists, helped by the British, Canadians, and Americans, and increasingly sophisticated in their own techniques, were mostly ready by the early 1970s to test a PNE, and awaited only government permission to do so. This came, according to Perkovich, in September 1972,