During the Nehru years (1947–64) and beyond, despite India's stated commitment to a foreign policy based on the principles of nonalignment and Gandhian nonviolence, it did not stop New Delhi from conducting a “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974—thereby joining the elite nuclear club made up of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. As Anderson's exhaustive and richly textured account shows, however, the foundations of the technological and managerial expertise that went into producing the Indian bomb were laid many decades earlier, going as far back as the 1920s.
To tell this long forgotten, yet important and inspiring story of “why India developed an atomic bomb, … how this was done, by whom, and with what means and objectives,” (p. 4) the author had to begin literally from scratch. As the preface notes, the author's interest in Indian science, scientists, and key policymakers was kindled...
