7 - ‘The Hindu Bomb’: Nuclear Nationalism in The Last Jet-Engine Laugh

Summary

In the twenty-first century the connection between religious fundamentalism, nuclear nationalism, and the pauperization of whole populations because of corporate globalization is becoming impossible to ignore.

Arundhati Roy

‘I am become death, the shatterer of worlds’: these words, taken as J. Robert Oppenheimer's reaction to the Trinity atomic bomb test, have often been repeated in popular culture. They come from the Bhagavad Gita (which translates as ‘Song of God’), a lecture given by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield before the start of the Kurukshatra War. The Bhagavad Gita is part of the epic poem the Mahabharata, a central text within the Hindu tradition. The nuclear weapon programme that India revealed to the world in May 1998 also invoked Hindu history and culture, in order to justify the righteousness of a nuclear-armed India. These claims were made on the basis of a civilizational superiority whose international pre-eminence necessitated and was reciprocated by the possession of nuclear weapons. To begin with Oppenheimer's quotation of a Hindu text is to raise a theme that will recur throughout this chapter: cultural borrowing as a form of aggrandizement. The development of nuclear weapons was claimed by many Hindu nationalists as a national status symbol because the country had acquired the military accoutrements of other major powers, not least its former European colonizers. On 18 May 1974, India detonated a nuclear device underground, ostensibly to exploit the technology's peaceful applicability for mining and excavation. Strobe Talbott, working in the US State Department, recalled a ‘normally reserved Indian diplomat’ in Washington who was delighted at the test and quoted the Bhagavad Gita as a reminder of Oppenheimer's words in 1945:

If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky

That would be like the splendour of the Mighty one…

I am become Death

The shatterer of Worlds.

Talbott's recollection has the diplomat continuing: ‘You Americans may have expropriated our deity when your scientists broke open this great secret […] but that did not give you a permanent monopoly on morality or on technology.

This chapter explores how South Asian writers have understood the possession of nuclear weapons – particularly the testing of India's nuclear arsenal in 1998 – as being central to the Hindu nationalism which achieved electoral success during the 1990s and 2000s.