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1 Introduction: Nuclear Power and Atomic Publics Itty Abraham The Coming of the Nuclear Age Most observers trace the origins of the nuclear “problem” in South Asia to 1998, the year in which India and Pakistan together conducted eleven nuclear tests and declared themselves nuclear powers. Others, more historically minded, trace the arrival of the nuclear age in South Asia to 1974, when India set off a single underground “peaceful ” nuclear explosion. Both views are substantially wrong. The people of India and Pakistan have been subject to nuclear power for more than sixty years. This statement can be read in two ways, both of which reaffirm this important and under-appreciated point. Since 1945, the people of Pakistan and India have been subject to the institutionalized terror represented by the so-called Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR/Russia, a conflict to which the whole globe was held hostage. The legacy of this hostile standoff, though reduced in its current immediacy, remains the most proximate reason why nuclear weapons are desirable objects for states around the world.1 The continued possession of thousands of nuclear weapons and warheads by Russia and the U.S., a behavior mimicked in smaller proportion by the United Kingdom, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and now possibly also North Korea and Iran, remains a daily reminder of the power of nuclear weapons as an unfortunate guarantee of being taken seriously in the world. 2 · Introduction In more local terms, the nuclear age in South Asia began with the end of the Second World War. In spite of the widespread and immediate revulsion at the use of nuclear weapons in Japan,2 Indian leaders soon decided that the country should develop its own nuclear industry. As a result, nuclear matters became a part of the region’s conceptual and industrial landscape from practically the moment of political independence. Nuclear power, enshrined as a state monopoly in the Indian Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948, became the ultimate example of the meeting of universal reason and local ingenuity: an extremely potent symbol and means to industrial development and recognized global importance.3 The globally appreciated symbolic and practical significance of nuclear power had a similar impact on Pakistan, which would create its own Atomic Energy Commission in 1954. Regardless of whether we take a global or a regional starting point—the nuclear age or the nuclear complex— the apprehensions and exhilaration that come with the presence of nuclear power have shaped and influenced the behavior of both states and their societies since their inauguration as politically sovereign entities. Even disregarding an institutional history as long as the independent political existence of both countries, given the enormously consequential relationship of nuclear power to questions of death, power, culture, national identity, and fiscal solvency, it is surprisinghowinfrequentlynuclearpowerisconsideredintheshapingofmodernSouth Asia.Foraslongastheyhavebeenaround,nuclearissueshavebeensegregatedfromstudies of contemporary social and cultural life. The work of understanding and interpreting nuclearSouthAsiahasbeenbestoweduponanalystsofsecuritystudiesandinternational relations, but not on anthropologists, cultural theorists, sociologists of science and technology , legal scholars, scholars of public policy, labor, or social movements, all of whom have vital things to say about this object and the field of social relations it constitutes.4 One reason for the relative segregation of nuclear matters from social and cultural analysis is the commonly held assumption that understanding nuclear weapons requires great technical knowledge. This is hardly true for a variety of reasons; perhaps most of all because nuclear technology is not, to borrow a familiar cliché, “rocket science.” As is argued below, and developed further in a number of chapters that follow, the seemingly self-evident quality of expertise—one aspect of the segregation of nuclear power from social and cultural analysis—should be seen as an expression of dominant power that actively seeks to block public debate over the alleged utility of nuclear power. This volume is a small first step in redressing that absence. Analyzing nuclear power through its multiple manifestations, including as a material force, site of resistance , techno-political space, symbolic and cultural referent, and state practice (rather than limiting the discussion to nuclear power as either an instrument of diplomacy and national security or a large-scale technological object for the production of electricity ), this multidisciplinary collection of essays argues that nuclear power has been an intimate element of India and Pakistan’s political, socio-cultural, and technological histories long enough to claim an important place in the shaping of postcolonial South Asian modernity. Hence, the first objective of this volume is collectively...

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