India's nuclear champion

From nuclear power to policy gaps and female literacy, former principal scientific advisor Rajagopala Chidambaram's memoir leaves readers with a lot to think about

Rajagopala Chidambaram joined Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) in the early 1960s. He retired as Principal Scientific Advisor in 2018. The 87-year-old has served as the director of Barc, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He is one of a handful of people involved in both Pokhran-I (1974) and Pokhran-II (1998).

His memoirs are arranged into chapters according to topics of interest. Much of it is first-person reminiscences, and thoughts on various subjects.  There are also anecdotes about dealings with several Prime Ministers, managing India’s interactions with the IAEA, handling sanctions and so on.

There are also several essays about him written by long-term acquaintances, friends, family and colleagues. The structure enables the author (and the reader) to focus on subjects of interest, instead of being bogged down by listings of time, place and occupation.

Dr Chidambaram shaped the nuclear programme, and he has thought deeply about education in general, and women in science. He’s also considered intractable challenges, such as creating the right ecosystems for Research & Design. He’s concerned about energy security, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, interdisciplinary scientific work, the need to create a quality industrial complex, and so on.

Dr Chidambaram’s PhD thesis was on nuclear magnetic resonance. But his post-doc research interests ranged from neutron crystallography, to hydrogen bonding, and high-energy physics. From the 1960s onwards, he was living two lives. In one, he worked at Barc on “vanilla” projects. In the other, he was part of hush-hush preparations for the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) at Pokhran in 1974 and, of course, he masterminded Pokhran II.

A “PNE” sounds like an oxymoron but it was once thought PNEs could help carry out a range of tasks. For example, PNEs could open up “tight” oil and gas deposits, fill in exhausted mines, help excavate canals, enable complex seismic measurements, and so on. While most of these use cases have been discarded, using PNEs as a last ditch defence against asteroids is still on the table.

A PNE is a bomb with fewer constraints in dimensions, weight and delivery mechanisms, since it need not be portable. Thus, PNEs could be used as a pretext to test new weapon designs. The US and the USSR carried out hundreds of tests.

The 1974 Pokhran test was a PNE with the same yield as the Hiroshima device. The 1998 tests consisted of multiple weapons (named as weapons, not PNEs) of different yields, including a thermonuclear device  — a so-called hydrogen bomb. There is quite a lot of controversy about whether that worked as advertised. Dr Chidambaram is firmly of the opinion it did but other scientists involved with Pokhran II say it didn’t.

There’s a lot in this book about the nuclear programme and its imperatives, as well as descriptions of the technical challenges in lay terms.  He is justly proud of the fact that India developed nuclear expertise indigenously without external inputs.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr Chidambaram and his colleagues fabricated instruments from scratch, and did measurements and calculations by hand. There was little open data about nuclear devices and they had to figure out how to safely dig holes to minimise radioactivity, make explosive lenses (the triggers for nuclear devices), calculate yields, radioactive fallout, and so on.

Incidentally, every Indian political formation has been pro-nuclear. The shafts used for the Pokhran -II tests were dug under Rajiv Gandhi’s orders in the mid-1980s. P V Narasimha Rao asked the Defence Research and Development Organisation to be ready to test, at 10 days’ notice. H D Deve Gowda enhanced nuclear budgets, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave the go-ahead.

Dr Chidambaram has two hobby horses. One is driving female literacy, the other is energy security and power consumption. He’s right in claiming these two variables are strongly correlated (or inversely correlated) with infant mortality, per capita, life expectancy, better health care, and so on.

Having worked through the opposed imperatives of meeting enhanced energy demands and combating climate change, he believes nuclear power has to be “bread and butter” in India’s energy mix.  He also speaks of the need to identify gifted children especially those who are “brilliant in a limited field” such as Ramanujan, a mathematical genius who failed school exams in other subjects. About semiconductors, he believes India must get into the market: “Many foundries over the world are sick, and one way is to buy them off and bring them into India, or to own them and operate overseas”. This may be more cost-effective than the production linked incentive scheme.

The first-person voice is that of a widely read, cultured individual with a strong sense of humour. For example, if references to the non-proliferation treaty came up on his foreign tours, and if “I felt a riposte was necessary, I would take off my glasses. That would be the cue to the ambassador to launch a tirade, defending India’s position.”

A self-taught lifelong yoga enthusiast, Dr Chidambaram played tennis until he was into his 80s. He says he avoided cricket as a young man for fear of being hit in the eyes. But he resumed playing when he reached veteran status secure in the knowledge that veteran bowlers cannot bowl bouncers. Oddly, he says he can’t swim but enjoys walking underwater!

There’s lots here for the reader to think about. One big question remains: Many of the policy suggestions are thoughtful and sensible. What ails the “steel frame” of India’s governance that an influential individual who reached the top of his profession could identify policy lacunae and suggest remedial action but not force the implementation through?