Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War

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 to show how India's leaders concurrently served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

Jayita Sarkar is associate professor of economic and social history at the University of Glasgow. Her research and teaching areas are global and transnational histories of decolonisation, capitalism, nuclear infrastructures, and South Asia. Her first book, Ploughshares and Swords. India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022), received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Best Book Award from the International Studies Association's Global Development Studies Section. She is currently writing two books: Atomic Capitalism. A Global History (under contract with Princeton University Press, America in the World series) and Connected Partitions: From South Asia to the World. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves on the board of directors for Arms Control Association in Washington, DC.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.