Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India (review)

In Nucleus and Nation, the author, a seasoned India hand, explores the complex relationship between the culture of science, the dynamics of scientific institutions, and political power, with a focus on India's fascinating journey toward the elite roster of nuclear powers. A product of decades of painstaking research, it is a magisterial enquiry into numerous known and not-known facets of technoscience in India. On the eve of its independence, India was hardly taken seriously by its Western counterparts. But in 1974, when India exploded its first nuclear bomb, the whole picture changed. This technological feat began many decades before, when Indians were fighting against both political and intellectual subordination. In the mid-twentieth century, India transformed itself from dependence to independence, from the margins to the center of technoscientific activities. With felicity and fluency, Anderson captures this shift and makes the history live.

The book tells the story of the scientific and political moves behind India's first nuclear test. It is a maze-like story of twists and turns and conflicts in personal and political goals, one that resulted in the India we see today: a "nuclear," "high-tech," and "high-economy" nation. C. V. Raman and Meghnad Saha, scientists par excellence, articulated the goals and dreams underlying this transformation, while Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, Homi Bhabha, and V. A. Sarabhai established the institutions to achieve it. The latter were good organizers as well as skilled power-brokers, and they knew well how to mobilize resources and harness the changing political winds to achieve their goals.

A handful of Indian scientists identified nuclear power as a potential source of cheap energy and the independent India's scientific activities centered around that goal. The chief protagonists of the period were Saha (1893-1956), Bhatnagar (1894-1955) and Bhabha (1909-1966). They were supported by the political leadership, especially Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. But in the 1970s, a skeptical critique of science and scientists grew, as well as a new resistance to big and expensive scientific projects (radical Gandhians!). For the younger generation of scientists, such developments were shocking. But India "addressed, accommodated, and integrated that skepticism about scientific projects," as did other countries. Here Anderson focuses on the long institutional and individual history of India's nuclear research project.

Against the backdrop of the "technological embargo" (imposed by the United States because India had not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), the Indian scientific community struggled for self-reliance in science and technology, fought for intellectual property rights, tried to stem the brain drain of well-trained people out of India, and resisted interference from outside India. The individuals noted above formed the nucleus of this scientific community, becoming a powerful new elite capable of exercising new kinds of power in a "new country." They envisioned a modern India of industrial power, dams, solar power, petrochemicals and refineries, fertilizers, heavy water, and atomic energy reactors. All these projects required large amounts of electricity, which India did not have. Thus nuclear reactors were seen widely not only as a solution to India's energy crunch but also as a way to break a bottleneck that was choking development.

Anderson does not neglect the voices of dissent, whether those voices be the ones of the laboratory staff and knowledge workers who formed the Association of Scientific Workers of India (1948) and demanded better working condition, or those of women and mixed castes, or those who questioned the feasibility of such huge projects in Indian conditions. Thus, while certain individuals and institutions hold center stage, the author presents a wide range of characters as influencing the development of India's technoscientific capabilities in general and nuclear power in particular.

The result is an authoritative study of the social history of science in India and the transmutation of technoscientific culture that has made India what it is today. That the monograph has twenty-five chapters demonstrates the intensity of...