U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created, in the words of George Orwell, a world “horribly stable” and “a peace that is no peace,” increasing power of the state over the individual and of the United States over the world. Atomic Capitalism critically examines this view and assumptions about preponderance of the United States by placing nuclear infrastructures in a global and transnational perspective.

The discovery of nuclear things— radium, radioactivity, uranium’s properties of fission, and plutonium, among others— being entangled in Euro-American late imperialism powerfully linked nuclear infrastructures to corporate violence, colonialism (settler and non-settler), and genocide, which characterized late nineteenth and twentieth-century empires. From the 1890s to the 1990s, the uranium cycle and its material infrastructures associated with mining, weapons, and energy gave rise to an extractivist, surveillant, and inegalitarian global system through which capitalist actors and networks benefited by disenfranchising people in faraway colonies, dependent territories, and at home.

The extraction and surveillance transpired through the expropriation of land for mining, testing nuclear weapons, and building reactors; the extraction of labor of Indigenous and Black bodies that more often worked in mining and/or lived near weapons testing sites; and the expansion of debt through risky lending practices to recently decolonised countries, entrapping them in long-term techno-economic dependence on governments, banks, and businesses located in the Global North, particularly but not only in the United States. The outcome was a complex extractivist web of inequalities that is intrinsically linked to our current economic and environmental crises.

India’s nuclear program is often misunderstood as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. In Ploughshares and Swords, Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom, narrating a global story of India’s nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program’s civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India’s leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally-connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the chokepoints of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.