Article ID: CBB805970112

Atomic Structures: The Architecture of Nuclear Nationalism in India and Pakistan (2015)

unapi

A half-century after their completion, India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) stand out as unchallenged architectural advertisements for ‘nuclear nationalism’. Elsewhere, Atoms for Peace reactors made no pretence to architectural refinement. In the right hands, however, ‘Cold War Modern’ could express the hard power of the nuclear age. For India and Pakistan, these nuclear laboratory complexes became the public faces of the peaceful atom that held out the promise, and masked the peril, of the atomic age at home and abroad, and deliberately deflected attention away from clandestine nuclear weapons programmes. BARC and PINSTECH, envisioned as cornerstones for self-confident and self-reliant programmes of nuclear physics, embodied the paradox of postcolonial science, necessarily borrowing from the West but determined to break the cycle of dependency, in defiance of Western expectations.

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Authors & Contributors
Weber, Steven A.
Belcher, William R.
Abraham, Itty
William J. Glover
Aashique Ahmed Iqbal
Grise, Michelle Claire
Concepts
Technology and government
India, civilization and culture
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Technology and society
Technology and politics
International relations
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
Prehistory
19th century
Ancient
20th century, early
Places
India
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Sri Lanka
South Asia
Nepal
Institutions
Atoms for Peace 1983 Washington, DC
East India Company (English)
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