ndia's 1974 nuclear test was a small but important quest to build a scientific community with a deep culture of institutional struggle and competition. So says Canadian Professor Robert Anderson, who is visiting Cambridge from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, in an interview with Asian Affairs' Shyam Bhatia.

Asian Affairs: You take an interest in nuclear proliferation, but your academic background is that of an anthropologist. Isn't that unusual?

Robert Anderson: By training I'm an anthropologist, but I'm Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. So I bring the skills of anthropology to the study of communication.

AA: Isn't that an unusual discipline for tackling the issue of the Indian nuclear programme?
RA: It was unusual at the time, in the 60s — less unusual now. I think there are a few anthropologists who study nuclear matters, or who study scientists and complex technology situations like accelerators. So although this is now something that has become more common, in the 60s it was definitely not.

AA: How does an anthropological approach to the Indian nuclear programme differ from a scientific approach?
RA: An anthropologist would like to know how scientists organize their research questions, how their work is structured, what questions mean to them, how they communicate about what's researchable and what's not, how they evaluate each other's work, how they withstand the long, almost glacial process by which they work. They write, they publish, it takes a long time. It takes time to be recognized. So you have both high speed rhythms but also very gradual progress in their fields. So it's just to see how their institutions are structured and how they behave inside them, how they govern them, how they govern them to their advantage in terms of creating an environment which they would like to work in and stay. And then how they renew themselves, that they recruit, draw in bright young things and how do they keep them and what are the incentives to keep them and then how they gradually decide whether these bright young things are going to stay and work in the group and move along or move out. It's also the whole question of the renewal of science and scientific institutions.

AA: Are you looking at motivation?
RA: You have to, you have to look at motivation, you have to look at life experiences, look at class and status mobility. In a country like India in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, recruitment to science was an enormous status shift for people from families which previously had nobody educated in the modern sense This wasn't invariable, but there were many such families in which bright kids were seen by a village teacher and that teacher said this kid should be protected from these other things you want him to do. Leave him alone, let's let him become a mathematician. Yes, they were mostly boys but not invariably.

AA: So it was an upwards shift?
RA: Yes, it was a huge social mobility opportunity. You see there were two phenomena co-evolving and in tension, one was science as institution, the other was science as movement. That is why it is important to track how the people's science movements of the mid-1970s lead towards the state-organized technology missions of the 1980s.

AA: Was the work you did on the Indian nuclear programme part of the two books you've published?
RA: Well, it came from my thesis and an earlier book I wrote in 1975, which was called Building Scientific Institutions: Meghnad Saha and Homi Bhabha. The recent book is called Nucleus and Nation and it's about scientists' international networks and power in India, now available in India. The forthcoming book will probably be called Negotiating Nuclear Power — maybe out two years from now. I've written half of it but I've been exposed to so much new material in the archives that I can't in good conscience ignore it. I have to slug my way through it and sort it out.

AA: In the preamble to a recent talk you gave in London, you talked about different routes to the bomb. What routes are you talking about?
RA: Well, people like to trace as simply as possible a thread of thinking about a nuclear weapon, or a bomb, from some beginning moment. Maybe when Saha said something about the possibility of blowing up the giant battleship with a nuclear bomb in 1939, it's a passing remark. As if choosing the initial moment and tracking the single thread to 1974 would provide history of something or something simple and linear in India. But you can't do all of that without a whole fabric, infrastructure, intellectual, political, conceptual and of course technical.

You can probably see I don't agree with this single, thrilling narrative approach. The story I am telling is the gradual construction of the Indian scientific community with its technological basis. In the Indian case particularly, the creation of this very powerful Department of Atomic Energy was used to finance projects that had nothing to do with this thread leading to the bomb — that it supported mathematics, micro biology, radio astronomy, all kinds of physics and science education right down to the high schools. It was only part of a very large effort to build a protective and innovative scientific community in India. By protective I mean of scientists and their interests. The Indian route to the bomb was to build upon a scientific community with a deep culture of institutional struggle and competition, asking 'what is indigenous, what is authentically “Indian”?' And a very strong tradition of international networking was beginning around 1910, so it is now one hundred years of layered experience. The 1974 bomb test was an important small flash in that sweep of history, exaggerated by some for their purposes, welcomed joyfully and even mindlessly by others, and clearly very satisfying to atomic energy planners in a situation where there was still very little electricity from the reactors. Those more aware of the 1998 bomb test context need to remember the conditions which prevailed in 1974. There were many other things not yet completed, drinking water, public health, personal security, better transportation, and so on; and in that list I include electricity, which was gradually becoming a socially and politically realistic expectation that the state should supply.

AA: What did you discover in your latest research that's new?
RA: I've been looking at the Indian shift to build a high-tech economy, it's about the war on self-reliance among scientists and technologists inside the Indian system, the confrontation of people who felt they had the key to national self-reliance, whatever that is; they each defined it differently. And so this war was possible because they were talking about different things, talking past each other — and the idea of a high-tech India, to move the Indian economy away from the classic commodity export world. It is clear that this movement does not begin with economic liberalisation in 1991, as some people would like to imagine, it is much, much older.

AA: What is new that you've discovered on the nuclear front?
RA: I think we now know a great deal about the planning and the pressures on the people who eventually built the tunnels and designed the devices and the triggers and so on and who tested the weapon. But I'm also working in the IAEA archives in Vienna on how the so-called peaceful nuclear explosion was defined as early as 1968 by Russians and Americans. So I had definitions much earlier than '68, a definition into which Indian voices could step. At Vienna Ramanna and others were there in the meetings around the peaceful nuclear explosion from 1970. Therefore well before the test in '74, Indians were present and engaged in conversations about peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. I suppose people were aware of this at the time, but it was eventually forgotten, and the PNE [Peaceful Nuclear Explosions] idea appeared to observers only as an after-thought, an intellectual convenience in 1974. I too imagined that, but like others I was wrong.

AA: What is new that has surprised you as someone who has researched the subject for such a long time?
RA: That a significant number of physicists and technicians and engineers in the bomb project could over three or four years work together quietly without producing paper, without leaking this knowledge very widely. There must have been others who knew. So outside the prime minister's office and this working group, probably very few people knew there was going to be a test and when it would occur. They did create the preconditions and they tested it successfully without anyone's realization. Indians always described their country where this is impossible. It's not me, it's an Indian self-definition that we are not a nation very good at keeping secrets. And here was a case where they did so between three or four years.

Also the surprise that others felt about this test — of course there were people who gained great joy from this small test, who were ecstatic about it. The surprise that others felt was soon cooled off for a large number of other Indians who said that, yes, this is quite an achievement, quite a surprise, quite satisfying. But now what, what does this mean. Some said within a few months, so what? Indians, I'm only talking about the Indian response. So what? We know that within 14 months the country was in a state of emergency and the glamour of the test was pretty diminished after. And we do hear and see in the secret files of other countries, reference to the probability of another test, the possibility of another test. But it didn't occur for a long time, not for another 24 years.

AA: There is a duality about the Indian programme, not just the peaceful and non-peaceful option, but also the duality of knowing and not knowing. Are there other countries that have followed this Indian route?
RA: South Africa may or may not have tested, I don't think there is anything conclusive. They say they withdrew from testing, they had the ingredients for four test bombs, and stopped. There were lots of people in South Africa, I'm told, who did not know about their bomb readiness. Israel may have tested, North Korea may have tested. So, yes, there was this duality — unlike the Americans, French, British, Chinese, for whom it was a glorious and very public thing; although the actual enclave was a secret space, the rest was quite public and it was a demonstration of power. So I think the countries more like India would look like Iran. The Iranians could easily be reading from the Indian book by keeping the option open.

AA: Is it possible the Iranians have taken a close look at the way the Indians achieved their nuclear weapons status?
RA: We know that by the late '60s the nuclear communities in Iran and India were in regular communication. If there is communication today it's nothing new. Smart Iranians would have learnt a lot about the Indian process over the years, even before the Shah left. My intuition is that Iranians on the inside of the nuclear community would know the Indian story fairly well. If they read a few books like mine and others, they would be able to construct a narrative which suited them. In this I am on the side of the scientific idealists, I think more communication and interaction between scientists is a good thing, and the closed secrecy that nuclear communities adopt is not a good thing, not in the long run.

AA: If you look at the Indian programme, when exactly does the process start to acquire a nuclear weapons option?
RA: I don't think that it's accurate to say that before independence people thought of a nuclear bomb. Just because Meghnad Saha — he was a very bright guy — thought in 1939 you could blow up a huge battle ship with this — which is true. Just because he thought that, he wasn't personally committed to its pursuit. Nor were other physicists, not really until the mid-1950s was this articulated as an idea. And we know the acquisition of the capability was a gradual trial-and-error process.

AA: Was that remark by Saha in a paper or a talk?
RA: It must have been in 'Science and Culture', which he edited, the famous monthly journal. He was very impressive, a far-sighted guy. But I think there may have been some chatter among the physicists during the war that it was possible. We don't know how much communication Indian scientists had with people they knew in Britain, or in America who they knew. But we're told that when Bhabha didn't find responses to letters and noticed what was happening in the journals they began to put pieces together: 'Aha! There must be something going on.' This was in 1943/44. We're told that Bhabha wrote to people who weren't publishing and he thought to himself why he wasn't seeing papers from key people.

But then Indian scientists had a tour of nuclear facilities in '44 and '45 in Canada, America and Britain. Bhabha was not involved. Meghnad Saha was there, and Santi Bhatnagar was in this mission, Nazir Ahmed was in it — he was a physicist and he became the first chairman of the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission. They went to Chalk River, to Montreal, to the nuclear sites in the UK — although most of the sites had been moved to America. They also went to Berkeley, but didn't go to Los Alamos, they went to Oak Ridge, Washington and Columbia University in New York. All had knowledge of labs working on the Manhattan Project. So they were figuring it out. But that doesn't mean they say, 'Gee, our Uncle Sam has got one of these' and something big, shouldn't we have one too? I really don't think so. After the August 1945 bombing, the Indian scientists, like their counterparts elsewhere, warned that this was very dangerous and must be developed carefully and controlled. We must remember that they saw India to be in an energy crisis, to which nuclear energy was to be a solution; they did not see India to be in a security crisis to which a nuclear weapons were to be a solution.

AA: Well everything starts in the minds of men, so there's the physical start of something and the ideas start. So it would go back to the scientists.
RA: Yes, although there were politicians who probably didn't know a thing about the scientists and nuclear technology in the '50s but certainly in the 1960s they were saying, 'This is a very good idea', particularly after the 1964 atomic bomb test by China.

AA: Was it politicians or scientists who had the greatest influence on the direction of India's nuclear programme?
RA: It's difficult because it's hard to separate them. There were few politicians who had any influence because Nehru had so much. There was a tree under which very little moved. I guess he accepted the advice of physicists and chemists who were not elected politicians but who were political scientists. Kothari would be one of them, also Bhabha, Bhatnagar, Jnan Ghosh, Meghnad Saha, Mahalanobis. So Nehru is meeting scientists who are political, who understand politics well enough and so there is a special bond formed between them and Nehru.

AA: Was it a scientist or politician who was the driving force behind the bomb?
RA: It depends when we ask that question. If Nehru is alive and if it's before the China conflict — when he is a bit more ebullient and not so old — I think it's Bhabha. Nehru was listening to Bhabha and telling Bhabha, 'Yes, well, you be ready, but we're not moving. Just be ready' — but although his mind is quite open on the bomb question, he's not made any commitment. Mind you, we've not seen his papers, so we don't know if Nehru privately thought it was a good idea or bad idea, how long it would take, et cetera. We must not forget they were more deeply invested in electricity generated from atomic reactors, and there was no evidence for that effort yet (when Nehru died) so this diversion could hardly be talked around town as a better idea.

AA: Did Bhabha think it was a good idea?
RA: I think so — to keep the option open. We are told he began talking quietly about it around 1956 or 1957. But after Nehru's death and the China test in '64 — and maybe even after the conflict with China in '62 — he was in touch with people who thought about this a lot. But I don't think he himself was a strategic sort of analyst, thinking about how the Chinese had invaded an obscure part of the North East frontier. What Bhabha did was participate in conversation about high altitude landings, radar systems, micro wave (for example, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research there was a small microwave project that was rapidly enlarged by defence funds in 1962). So whether Bhabha thought this conflict with China was sufficient to move ahead on the bomb — he might have used it opportunistically to talk top Nehru, but my feeling is the path is clearer in October '64, when the Chinese carry out their test. We have reports of conversations with him when people describe him talking about it. After all, he went on All India Radio to say what he could do in 18 months. He exaggerated a bit, but he still was thinking about it, he was not doing it, he was building scientific capabilities, which he was very good at.

AA: If you were to rank someone — any of these people — in terms of keeping open the bomb option, who would you rank highest? Nehru, Bhabha, Ramanna, Bhatnagar? And why do you rank Bhatnagar so high?
RA: I would rank Nehru and Bhabha first, then physicists like Ramanna next. You must remember Bhatnagar died on New Year's night of '54/'55 in full flight as the key inside broker of the Atomic Energy Commission. And he's also the point man for the petroleum policy, for refineries, oil exploration, new laboratories and so on. He's deeply involved in energy in ways that people don't appreciate, he's a chemist who trained in London, got his Master's degree in Lahore. In London he did a DSc. So he understands the oil business very well, he's very much involved with oil exploration in the Punjab, he gets an understanding of what we call Natural Gas. By '45 he's aware of the importance of nuclear energy and by '46 he's the Secretary of the Atomic Energy Committee — the board of the committee that disperses money for projects before independence.

AA: Would Bhatnagar have known of the bomb option?
RA: Well, he died in '55. I would never say he was a bomb wallah, no. Unlike some people I think somewhere there's evidence that key Indian figures were thinking about the bomb in '54 when they go to Geneva, when Bhabha becomes chair of the peaceful uses conference. I think it's a long stretch to say that much before that they're thinking of a bomb programme in the sense of planning it. The idea of a bomb had come from physicists and there had been a demonstration of that not just once or twice in Japan, but many times in America and Russia, and once already by Britain. There had been many tests, quite public before '55. But I don't know about Bhatnagar. I've not seen his private papers, so I don't know what he said privately to people, but he was in regular contact about this with Nehru and Bhabha — and he was very useful — about the whole nuclear programme. He was a key administrative figure, a Fellow of the Royal Society in his own right, a knight called Sir Shanti. He's involved in the thorium business, negotiating with the Americans about heavy water, he's looking at the uranium trade, he's involved in the planning and implementation of nuclear policy. He's not only a working member of the Atomic Energy Commission, but I don't think he has to be. But I think he's even more useful outside it.

AA: Does it make sense now that on the one hand India publicly preaches the value of peaceful uses of nuclear energy while privately keeping all its options open?
RA: It made sense to Nehru and Bhabha and all the people who by '64 were aching for India to do something around this. Yes, it made sense to them. They were, I think, very glad that Mr Nehru's sceptical views were no longer an obstacle — although I think Bhabha found that Mr Shastri was not a pushover in this regard. As the Prime Minister, he must and would proceed carefully, he told them. He would take this step and not that step. But Mr Shastri was receiving a lot of political pressure. Why not move along, why not show our true colours and Mr Shastri was wisely saying: well, let's not rush this. It was a prolonged negotiation.

AA: For an outsider looking in, it smacks of hypocrisy.
RA: They had an image to maintain, except in '65 they were then involved in a full out tank war with Pakistan. So I don't think they had intended or planned, but it seemed to come upon them. I can't say who were the first movers or second movers, but they were involved in that and after that they realized they had to militarise in a new way. But until then and until the confrontation with China, India's self-image was of a low military posture with moderate budget consumption for military hardware. It may not be true but it's still the image they maintained. Remember that images are not built for others alone, they are built for those who inhabit them too, they have important dual effects. Images are beehives, the builders of images inhabit them like bees live in their hives. You have to look carefully at the military budget: how much was going for pensions, how much was going for salaries, et cetera. The other stuff was how much was going for new weapons systems in the '50s. But the Indian self-conception, which Nehru promoted strongly to his advantage, was as a mediating country, not terribly militarized, prepared to go to battle only if necessary — especially after '62 — but not driven by military ideas. Not a martial foreign policy, the minister of defence was never a military person. So they always had this different sel- conception. The atom bomb did not fit easily into that.

AA: But the irony is that India today, with more money and nuclear weapons, seems to count for less than it did 30 years ago. There's an irony in that.
RA: I myself can't answer that question. It's puzzling. It's hard to explain ironies and this is in a way what my new book is about — the perception of outsiders. What India is, or South Asia is, after the 1974 tests. It shifts. They're always quarrelling. It's usually about Kashmir — they frame it that way. They're not only quarrelsome, but one of them has exploded a nuclear bomb and it can't possibly be for peaceful purposes. Nobody believed that even though in the PNE committee at the IAEA, the Indians were always present right through to '79 and always said the same hopeful thing about peaceful uses. So in context from '68 to '78, the Indian physicists from BARC or a government official are at every meeting of the PNE committee. It doesn't meet very often, but it often meets very intensively and because it's a creature of the NPT, the committee's charter says nothing should be done to prejudice the right of a developing nation to make use of the capabilities of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
So it was a perfect playing field upon which Mr Ramanna and P K Iyengar could step after the test. But they had been at that table long before. I had not understood that. Like others, I always mistakenly thought that they just showed up, that they showed up after the test and said this is what we've done. But actually they'd been there from the beginning.

AA: But isn't the idea of the PNE a bit of a non-sequitur?
RA: The Russians were committed to it, they did underground testing, we have a paper now on Russian underground tests of 1955. They blew up mountains, whole mountains, they were testing very large weapons, but they were always interested in seismic effects. I don't know in the beginning to what end, but by the '60s they had engineers who said they could create large cavities for oil, shale oil in particular. So these caverns or cavities were interesting for them. And the Americans were doing it too, at the same time. Then they and the Americans started talking in the '60s about removing geological obstacles to projects — it's called explosive engineering and that's quite an old business. There were engineers and geologists and others who said why not use a nuclear thing for this vast, heavy rock, much cheaper. There were a lot of questions about venting, radioactive debris and how much emerges and when. Indians always officially said after May '74 there was no venting, no release of radioactive particles. I am now studying the international reception of the official Indian explanation of 'peaceful uses'.

In this explosive engineering culture, were you going to spend $10 million to blow up something with conventional explosives? Why not spend $1.5 million by using nuclear explosives?

In 1958 the largest non-nuclear explosion in history occurred in April 1958 near my village in British Columbia (I was sixteen). It was the destruction of the famous navigation obstacle called ripple rock, using 1300 tons of nitramex 2H to blow up 370,000 tons of rock underneath 300,000 tons of water, all at 100 metres below the surface. this is precisely what the blast engineering community was doing, and I think there is a transfer of the blasting idea to the nuclear testing community, obsessed as it then was with seismic detection, and eventually to 'advanced warning' of testing between Russians and Americans. So if it looks like a convenient non-sequitur, we must look at the historic context, and that is what I am now trying to re-create, from previously secret documents, up to the thirty-year cut-off year of 1980.

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