Documents on the history of Indian nuclear development, focusing on assistance from and intervention by the Soviet Union and the United States. See also Nuclear Proliferation, and the related collections in the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project. (Image: Agni-V Missile passes through the Rajpath during the full dress rehearsal for the Republic Day Parade-2013, in New Delhi on January 23, 2013. Ministry of Defence, Government of India under the ID 44846)
If India had presented the world with a nuclear fait accompli, the eminent Indian journalist Amalendu Das Gupta mused in 1987, “the Americans and their allies would have been angry; the Russians would have been unhappy." His choice of words succinctly expressed the ambivalent attitude the Soviet leadership had toward India’s nuclear weapon program.
Jayita Sarkar explores technological collaboration between the French and Indian Atomic Energy Commissions, using new archival documents to expose how shared opposition to U.S. information censorship and the desire to preserve foreign policy independence fostered nuclear collaboration between the two nations.
What did the overthrow of the Chilean President Salvador Allende have to do with Indian nuclear weapons? More than you might suspect.
Through extensive use of newly available materials from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, this working paper helps demystify India’s nuclear decision-making between 1973 and 1976.
A recent article in The National Interest (TNI) presented archival evidence to argue that India intended to develop a full-spectrum nuclear weapons capability as early as 1969. However, other archival sources related to Indian nuclear history raise doubts about the purported provenance and significance of this source.
India’s “peaceful nuclear explosion” on 18 May 1974 caught the United States by surprise in part because the intelligence community had not been looking for signs that a test was in the works.
In the last months of 1995, U.S intelligence agencies detected signs of nuclear test preparations at India's test site in Pokhran, but the satellite photos that analysts studied were "as clear as mud."
In May 1998, India and Pakistan conducted the twentieth century’s last nuclear tests.
Researcher Martand Jha explores the origin and history of India's Department of Atomic Energy.
Indian archival sources on China’s successful 1964 nuclear test clarify the origins of India’s nuclear weapons program.
