Cirus, India’s second nuclear reactor, was established with Canadian assistance and US heavy water supplies at the height of the US-Soviet Cold War. It was the result of the determination of newly independent India, under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, not to miss the just-dawning nuclear age. Therein lies its importance. Beyond plutonium for weapons.
A militarily weak, economically dependent country seen by the West as a Soviet ally nevertheless managed to get from Canada its most advanced reactor technology of the day. And this, only a few years after Nehru had steadfastly refused to export monazite sands from the coasts of Kerala and Tamil Nadu to the US, which wanted the rare-earths rich sands to start its own thorium-based nuclear reactor programme. Nehru had banned the export of monazite saying that India would need it for its own industrial development. In fact, he did not give in even when the US Congress made supply of monazite a condition for sending India food grains to overcome a famine in that era of India’s ‘ship-to-mouth existence’ that threatened to leave millions of Indians dead. In the end, the US Congress gave in. Sixty years later, India is the only country in the world chasing, and anywhere close to, thorium-based nuclear nirvana, the final stage of the three-stage nuclear programme that Homi Bhabha designed for India in 1959.
Who made the Cirus ‘coup’ possible? Homi Bhabha, an internationally acknowledged cosmic ray physicist, was a man who moved in the company of the giants of the just-dawning age of quantum physics – with Paul Dirac for teacher, Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr among others for mentors and collaborators. His friendships, from his Cambridge days, with British and Canadian nuclear helmsmen enabled him to get what he wanted, on his terms.
Cirus was at the time among the most advanced nuclear reactors. Bhabha even got the Canadians to bear half the cost in the form of a grant. The 40 MW reactor cost a grand $14 million. To replace what we shut down would easily cost many times over today.
With Bhabha’s death, and especially after India’s 1974 nuclear bomb test, India lost access to Western nuclear technology and scientists, but it stood its ground on nuclear issues, especially concerning international nuclear regimes.
By the time America was willing to lift sanctions and regimes, Indian scientists had built on the foundations that Bhabha had laid and become technologically advanced, but resource-constricted as it had become difficult to obtain uranium fuel.
To get out of what was becoming a death-grip on the nuclear programme, Prime Minister Manmohan struck the ‘nuclear deal’ with former US President George Bush. But this time, an admittedly richer, stronger India nevertheless gave in to a number of conditions that the US imposed. The shutting down of Cirus — recently refurbished to extend life by 20 years — is testimony to how India has changed, from Nehru to Manmohan Singh.