Review in ('Down To Earth' dated 15th Oct, 2003)
“We have to prove
that we are not eunuchs,” Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray had said after India’s
May 1998 nuclear tests. Amidst all the hype and “wargasm” in political circles
and a considerable section of the media in the aftermath of the tests, there
also emerged a group that began questioning India’s decision to acquire weapons
of mass destruction. And these questions concern all of us. What was the
political motive behind the tests? Is India actually a more secure country now
that it has nuclear weapon capabilities? What has been the role of India’s
scientists in this nuclearisation process? What are the possible economic and
environmental fallouts?
This book, a collection of essays by well-known academics and opinion-makers
such as Kanti Bajpai, Amartya Sen, Jean Drèze and others, presents a critical
view of India’s nuclearisation process.
The essays are
categorised into four distinct sections, each dealing with the purposes and
impact of nuclearisation on a particular set of issues — strategy and foreign
relations; science and ethics; militarisation; and environment and health.
Thackeray may have chosen a sexual metaphor, but acquiring nuclear weapons is
more than just an issue of potency. J Robert Oppenheimer, architect of the
nuclear bomb, was sufficiently moved after witnessing the first
us
atom bomb test in 1945, to quote from the Bhagavad Gita — “I am become Death,
the shatterer of worlds”.
Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream, edited by M.V. Ramana and C. Rammanohar Reddy, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2003, hardback, p.502, Rs. 575.