Countdown

"It began as a long piece Amitav Ghosh , one of India’s greatest novelists, wrote in The New Yorker in 1998, after India exploded its first nuclear bomb and announced itself as a nuclear power. Amitav Ghosh set about traveling in India. He went to the site of the nuclear blast, he went to Pakistan, which also exploded a nuclear device after India did. He went to the highest battle zone in the world. He met Indian soldiers there. He trailed the Indian defence minister, George Fernandes, who began his career as a socialist firebrand against Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s government and ended his career as India’s defence minister in a government led by Hindu nationalists. Quite a fascinating career, a trade unionist becoming an apologist for the most jingoistic policies. Part of the reason I picked this book is because the delusions that led India to pursue a nuclear policy have not vanished. If anything, they’ve been reinforced by the events of the past seven years. Modi said, not long ago, that we haven’t got nuclear weapons just for show. He was effectively saying that, if pushed, we will use them. And Amitav Ghosh gives the most vivid description of what will happen if nuclear weapons are exploded in India: “On detonation a nuclear weapon releases a burst of high-energy x-rays. These cause the temperature in the immediate vicinity to rise very suddenly to tens of millions of degrees. The rise in temperature causes a fireball to form which shoots outward in every direction, cooling as it expands. By the time it reaches the facades of North Block and South Block,” which are two government buildings in Delhi, “it will probably have cooled to about 300,000 degrees—enough to kill every living thing within several 100 feet of the point of explosion. Those caught on open ground will evaporate; those shielded by the buildings’ thick walls will be incinerated.” This is what will happen if a nuclear device were to explode in Delhi. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’ve often thought that this book should be part of the Indian syllabus. Every school goer should read it because we tend, in India, to take pride in being a nuclear power. There’s another book by Amitav Ghosh called In an Antique Land. As a DPhil student at Oxford, he goes to Egypt to do his field research and Egyptians think he comes from a very underdeveloped, poor country where they worship cows. And Amitav Ghosh says, ‘No, I come from a very powerful country, we have one of the most sophisticated armies in the world.’ That stayed with me because people can end up taking pride in these things. But the cost of that, as Amitav Ghosh goes on to explain in this book, can be the eradication of organised human life. This book really deserves a very wide audience. People outside of India should read it to understand the vanities that have led India to pursue a nuclear policy. Some of the arguments Indian thinkers have made over the years are valid. They said that the nuclear regime that the United States insists upon is quite discriminatory, because the US gets to keep its bombs, France gets to keep bombs, Britain gets to keep bombs, but India and other countries shouldn’t have them. The answer to that, I suppose, is to campaign for the elimination of those weapons—rather than multiplying nuclear states around the world. That’s the point. Anyone who reads Countdown will come away wondering, ‘What is the point of these weapons?’ I’m not a peacenik. I believe that India is surrounded by genuine adversaries. But every time I read something that makes an argument for an expanded armed force I think about this book. It’s really sobering."