| Between May 11 and May 13, 1998,
India detonated five nuclear test devices at Pokhran, Rajasthan,
about three months before the end of my Fulbright tenure (and barely
three weeks before I was due to travel through Rajasthan). Normally
sober, progressive news publications in Bombay went wild with praise
for this action of the newly-minted conservative coalition, headed by
Prime Minister Vajpayee and the BJP.
From a certain point of view, the decision to conduct the test was understandable, even smart - indeed, in the end India's boldness seems to have been rewarded by the U.S. political establishment, despite initial approbation - but I felt that it was a losing bid for power in a destructive political game. This impression lead me back to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1999, with little to guide me but the memory of a meeting I once had at the Center for International Security Affairs (CISA, now part of the Nonproliferation and International Security division of the lab's Threat Reduction directorate), with Dr. Steve Gitomer, the senior science advisor to the State Department for Science Centers programs. |
Well before my time in India, I had studied the Russian language with a host family in Moscow for a semester. I had no reason for learning the language except a desire to know the country that was only just emerging from behind the mask of America's collective imagination of the Evil Empire. Later, I became interested in bilateral nonproliferation projects at Los Alamos, although as an undergraduate at the Lab I mostly did software development for laser spectroscopy. I happily left this to study in India, supposing that I might never return, yet return I did. In the summer of '99, I became an intern at CISA working to support Steve's advising for the Science Centers, multinational entities established as part of an international cooperative effort to reduce the post-Cold War threat of nuclear weapons, in particular those languishing in the decaying stockpiles of the former Soviet Union.
It was this unplanned conjuntion of coincidence and purpose that took me from promoting cooperative research on sustainable energy development in India, to supporting cooperative research on "sustainable" (non-weapons-oriented) technology in Russia. In this strange transition, I could not have asked for a better mentor than Steve, who introduced me to the world of international science and policy in Washington, D. C. - an exciting but complicated world for a physics major from the rural Southwest. Following my internship, I moved to Washington, and worked for two years at the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) in Arlington, Virginia.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the practice of nonproliferation, at least as supported by the U.S. Government, is concerned not so much with disarmament as nuclear hegemony. This does not prevent organizations like CRDF from doing excellent work supporting civilian science in the former Soviet Union, helping to dispel at least one old bogeyman of American foreign politics, but for me the realization resulted in another change of direction. As it had in the case of nonproliferation, my experience in India formed a good part of the inspiration that brought my focus to learning and education.