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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Abraham, Itty;
(2009)
South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan
(/isis/citation/CBB000954753/)
Article
Gisela Mateos;
Edna Suárez-Díaz;
(2015)
‘We Are Not a Rich Country to Waste Our Resources on Expensive Toys’: Mexico’s Version of Atoms for Peace
(/isis/citation/CBB791948381/)
Book
Daniel Haines;
(2017)
Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan
(/isis/citation/CBB415519768/)
Chapter
Kaur, Raminder;
(2009)
Gods, Bombs, and the Social Imaginary
(/isis/citation/CBB000954761/)
Book
Jacob Darwin Hamblin;
(2021)
The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB105394498/)
Book
Dr Aashique Ahmed Iqbal;
(2023)
The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India
(/isis/citation/CBB547914611/)
Article
Abraham, Itty;
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish;
(2015)
State Power and Technological Citizenship in India: From the Postcolonial to the Digital Age
(/isis/citation/CBB001550711/)
Article
Aspray, William;
(2010)
The Role of Policy in the Rise of the Indian Software and IT-Enabled Services Industry
(/isis/citation/CBB000933575/)
Book
Phalkey, Jahnavi;
(2013)
Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth-Century India
(/isis/citation/CBB001213742/)
Article
Arnab Chakraborty;
(2023)
COVID-19 Response in South Asia: Case Studies from India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan
(/isis/citation/CBB761997205/)
Book
Weber, Steven A.;
Belcher, William R.;
(2003)
Indus Ethnobiology: New Perspectives from the Field
(/isis/citation/CBB001422460/)
Article
Ernst, Waltraud;
(2007)
Beyond East and West. From the History of Colonial Medicine to a Social History of Medicine(s) in South Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB000773195/)
Article
Projit Bihari Mukharji;
(2015)
Technospatial Imaginaries: Masud Rana and the Vernacularization of Popular Cold War Geopolitics in East Pakistan, 1966–1971
(/isis/citation/CBB003143685/)
Article
Roger Kinns;
(2020)
Time signals for mariners in India, Burma, and Ceylon
(/isis/citation/CBB015970455/)
Book
William J. Glover;
(2008)
Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City
(/isis/citation/CBB108246394/)
Chapter
Weber, Steven A.;
(2003)
Archaeobotany at Harappa: Indications for Change
(/isis/citation/CBB001422466/)
Chapter
Belcher, William R.;
(2003)
Fish Exploitation of the Indus Valley Tradition
(/isis/citation/CBB001422465/)
Book
Cederlof, Gunnel;
Sivaramakrishnan, Kalayanakrishnan;
(2006)
Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB000950054/)
Article
Mauro Elli;
(2022)
‘Nuclear power is not just economics’: Atomic energy and economic development in the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant Project (Kanupp), 1955–1965
(/isis/citation/CBB400689632/)
Article
Mughal, Muhammad Aurang Zeb;
(2014)
Calendars Tell History: Social Rhythm and Social Change in Rural Pakistan
(/isis/citation/CBB001421836/)
Be the first to comment!