The Wretched Atom by Jacob Darwin Hamblin

Author:Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Nuclear Mosques and Monuments

The summer of 1974 was a season of angry Canadians, and Indian foreign secretary Kewal Singh felt its full force on a diplomatic visit to Ottawa in July. Newspapers abused him and Canadian officials berated him for what they saw as a betrayal of trust and a threat to world peace. From one Commonwealth nation to another, the conversations had the air of a sibling rivalry. For years, Canada and others had provided food aid and technical assistance to India, and Canada in particular had helped with nuclear reactors for electricity generation. In the past half-decade, the IAEA had upheld India as the symbol of atomic energy in the developing world, with its mutation plant breeding program. But India had done the unthinkable—and to some, unforgivable—by detonating an atomic explosive. Singh and other Indian officials insisted it was a peaceful one, like the ones promoted by the US Atomic Energy Commission. It was dubbed the Smiling Buddha, but the Canadians were not amused. For Singh, it was an exhausting visit to Canada, during which he had been treated to hostile criticism, threats to halt assistance, and embittered lectures about his nation’s world responsibilities.1

When the visit ended, Singh and his diplomatic entourage went on to Washington for some frank discussions at the US State Department. There he met with Henry Kissinger, who was having a bad summer, as President Richard Nixon was embroiled in controversy about illegal conduct in the Watergate scandal. Over the previous week, the US House of Representatives had adopted three articles of impeachment against Nixon, creating an aura of intense stress and tumult in Washington (Kissinger, ever the diplomat, simply referred to it as an “unsettled situation” to Singh; the president resigned a week later). If this were not enough to make diplomatic conversations a challenge, Kissinger was suffering from a painful in-grown toenail, only recently cut by a doctor. When Singh met with Kissinger on August 2, the secretary of state sat with his foot up on the table. Singh, who had been treated as an uppity stepchild by the Canadians in Ottawa, had to view Kissinger’s foot as the two men discussed India’s new place in the world.

“I don’t believe in recriminations about past events,” Kissinger stated to Singh, according to an official memorandum of conversation. “But I have wondered about the following. Intellectually, a peaceful nuclear explosion has a different meaning and significance for a developing country than it has for an advanced country.” It is difficult to imagine a more candid statement of Kissinger’s view of India’s place, or a more explicit acknowledgment of the double standard in Kissinger’s mind about nuclear technologies. Singh’s noncommittal answer is recorded as simply “Yes?” Kissinger then softened his statement, saying he meant only that advanced countries could control explosions with precision, whereas developing countries could not.2 He could not muster a stronger condemnation.

The test of the Smiling Buddha is typically seen as a fulcrum point in nuclear affairs, with the world growing more skeptical of the connections between economic uplift and nuclear programs in poor countries.

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