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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The book is an essential reference to understanding the complex nuclear histories of India and its regional competitors.
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.
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.
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.
John Krige, Georgia Tech, editor of How Knowledge Moves:
By drawing on a fine collection of sources, Sarkar demonstrates how nuclear material and technology were used as strategic assets in Indian nation-building and national security. An important contribution to our understanding of India's space and nuclear programs.
Nicholas Miller, Dartmouth College, author of Stopping the Bomb :
Ploughshares and Swords should be required reading for those interested in India's nuclear program and nuclear history more broadly. Sarkar convincingly shows that the desire for freedom of action has powerfully shaped India's nuclear decisions for decades.
Roxanne Panchasi, Simon Fraser University, author of Future Tense:
Challenging binaries of peaceful and military, development and security, in narratives of India's nuclear past and present, Jayita Sakar makes a vital contribution to global Cold War studies. Understanding India's nuclear and space programs as imbricated technological projects, Ploughshares and Swords is at once a history of decolonization and its legacies, visions of 'modernity,' and the complexities of geopolitics.
David Holloway, Stanford University, author of Stalin and the Bomb :
Sarkar has given us a very revealing analysis of India's nuclear program during the Cold War, exploring its civil and military dimensions as well as its domestic and international contexts with due attention to their ambiguities and complexities. An excellent book.
Srinath Raghavan, Ashoka University, author of Fierce Enigmas:
This book is the first history of India's nuclear program that is truly global in scope. No previous historian of the topic has cast their net as widely or come up with archival materials that are quite as striking. An outstanding international and transnational history.
Gyan Prakash, Princeton University, author of Emergency Chronicles:
Ploughshares and Swords brilliantly demonstrates that India's nuclear and space programs were interconnected and designed as instruments of both technopolitics and geopolitics since their inception. They were always planned to be of dual use: economic modernity and national security, peaceful and military, domestic and international. A splendid achievement.
Lorenz Lüthi, McGill University, author of Cold Wars:
Jayita Sarkar takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the world's political, scientific, and business networks that nurtured India's dual-use nuclear program. Deeply researched and forcefully argued, this book compels us to radically rethink conventional wisdom about India's nuclear project.
Open Access
