Sarkar Speaks at Harvard Asia Center on India’s Nuclear Program
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently presented a chapter from her book manuscript, Ploughshares to Swords at the Harvard Asia Center on February 11, 2019.
The chapter entitled, “The First Battlefield of Western Nuclear Competition: India and Light Water Reactors, 1955-1963” examines the export of U.S. light water reactors to India to offset the impact of an imminent Chinese nuclear explosion, on the one hand, and to ensure that U.S. businesses gained a foothold in one of the earliest markets for nuclear energy in the developing world, on the other. Her lecture was part of the Harvard Seminar Series on Science and Technology.
The abstract of the chapter is below:
After President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” proposal at the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. technological superiority in nuclear technologies became a powerful tool of U.S. foreign policy in the form of civil nuclear assistance. American light water reactor sales were offered to Western Europe, Asia and elsewhere under Section 123 of the 1954 U.S. Atomic Energy Act, thereby, making General Electric, Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox and Combustion Engineering the major reactor suppliers in the world. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations were anxious about the impact of an imminent Chinese nuclear weapons test on non-Communist and non-aligned India. Policymakers in Washington, therefore, decided that the best chance of stalling Indian nuclear proliferation was to offer American power reactors that could help demonstrate the peaceful nuclear capability of the democratic Asian country, in sharp contrast to the military capability of the authoritarian Chinese communist state. Moreover, U.S. reactors would allow U.S. access and oversight on India’s nuclear program through safeguards. This led to the first bilateral reactor agreement between the United States and India leading to U.S. supply of two light water reactors built in Tarapur. Notwithstanding the Indian Atomic Energy Commission’s opposition to safeguards, its chairman Homi J. Bhabha accepted the US offer because of the generous financial package that it accompanied, thereby, beating the offer of reactors without safeguards from the French Commissariat a l’energie atomique. After India’s 1974 nuclear explosion, the US supplied light water reactors became tools of U.S. nonproliferation policy toward the Indian Atomic Energy Commission.
Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland.