India's nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.

Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

About the Author

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow. Follow her on X @DrJSarkar.

Reviews

This book provides not only a compelling history of India's nuclear program, but also new insights into decolonization, independence movements, and the Cold War in developing nations. It's an engrossing, well-researched history of India's nuclear ambitions.

* Kirkus Reviews *

Sarkar skillfully shows how Indian institution builders consistently made "polyvalent technopolitical choices to keep the nuclear weapons option perpetually open" through their ambiguity about whether nuclear development advanced civilian or military purposes.

* Choice *

Drawing on extensive interdisciplinary research, this book is a useful addition to the literature on India's nuclear programme that powerfully underscores the importance of its subject matter.

* LSE Review of Books *

The book is an essential reference to understanding the complex nuclear histories of India and its regional competitors.

* Arms Control Today *

Ploughshares & Swords is a major contribution to our understanding of India's nuclear programme, backed by multi-sited, plurilingual research. Sarkar has done more than anyone so far to unpack the geopolitical underpinnings of this nuclearisation process - notably by highlighting the interplay between international and domestic challenges to Indian territori- ality. The result is a book that is as rich in its argumentation as it is deep in empirical detail - and, to boot, thoroughly engrossing.

* Cold War History *

This is the work that scholars of India's nuclear program have been waiting for; it will be required reading for historians of several different fields - foreign relations, science and technology, and decolonization - to name just a few.

* Toynbee Prize *

Ploughshares and Swords is an immensely valuable work that builds upon and comprehensively enhances prior scholarship. It represents an important addition to the new generation of nuclear scholarship, an addition that deserves to have a lasting influence on the field.

* Diplomatic History *

Indian antinuclear circles may also find much validation in this book. While the Indian nuclear establishment is known for flouting domestic laws, Sarkar reveals how it meticulously followed the letter of the international law, if not the spirit, as it developed its testing capabilities. At the same time, it used international rule following to deftly evade further probing from domestic politicians and bureaucrats seeking to hold India's nuclear establishment democratically accountable.

* Technology & Culture *

Like any excellent work of scholarship, one of the strengths of Sarkar's book is that it points to many fruitful research directions that other scholars can pursue. Ploughshares and Swords will no doubt serve as a touchstone for scholarship on India's nuclear history going forward.

* H-Diplo, The Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum *


Awards
Winner of Bernard S. Cohn Prize 2024 (United States). Runner-up for Global Development Studies Book Award 2022 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501765018
Author Jayita Sarkar
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 21mm