When India imagined independence from Great Britain, it hoped to include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri lanka and Burma. A superpower, albeit requiring much development. The smaller India that emerged still had great ambitions and big rivals, so why not forsake some needed development to play big power games. Bizarrely, the West was ready to help. Well at least until Buddha smiled. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp shows the Atomic Research Center in the Trombay section of Bombay. It is from the same set of stamps as the Gnat airplane stamp I covered here, https://the-philatelist.com/2018/07/20/a-gnat-sting-slays-a-sabre-over-bangladesh/ . As with the Gnat, the stamp is long on the Indian achievement aspect, with no mention of the outside help that made it possible. Ah, superpower dreams….
Todays stamp is issue A205, a 10 Rupee stamp issued by India in 1965. It was an 18 stamp issue in various denominations. The 10 Rupee stamp, a high denomination then, was the highest indicating where India ranked the achievement of the nuclear center. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents used. Unmailed the stamps value goes up 30 times.
India’s work on nuclear energy began even before independence. The Tata organization, see also https://the-philatelist.com/2019/11/21/india-1958-independant-india-will-be-great-building-on-the-success-of-people-like-j-n-tata/ , was a big believer in Swadeshi, which is India doing for itself. In this case that means sending fellow Parsi Homi Bhabha to Cambridge to study and then fund his nuclear research center once back in India. The Parsi were Persians that British India took in as they were no longer welcome in Islamic Persia due to their Zoroastrian religious beliefs. Interesting that is was from these people the idea of Swadeshi got it’s backing.
Knowledge of how nuclear energy works is not enough, as to use it for peace or war, specialty manufacturing of intricate pieces is needed. The West and the East only developed this after slow expensive development. USA President Eisenhower then proposed the silly stunt of “atoms for Peace’. The American military industrial complex would be encouraged to build nuclear facilities in the third world in return for monitoring how they handle it and the countries’ word that the program would be peaceful. India, Pakistan, Israel, and Iran signed up and solemnly gave their word that the only intention was civilian atomic power. Canada got in on the graft from such a program by providing India another reactor. Over time, and it took a long time, India was able to reverse engineer the reactors they were given and add further reactors built locally. The process was slowed by the death of Homi Bhabha in a mysterious crash of an Air India 707 airplane in Switzerland. Conspiracy theorists blame the CIA, but planes do fly into mountains occasionally. 16 years before another Air India plane flew into the same mountain.
It will be no surprise that India lied about the peaceful intent of it’s nuclear power program. Plutonium derived from the spent nuclear fuel from the Canadian supplied reactor CIRUS at Trombay was used for India’s first nuclear bomb tested in 1974. The secret program was called Buddha Smiles. The smiles did not extend to the western powers that had foolishly helped the program along. Pakistan sped up their bomb program that also had received help from atoms for peace, see https://the-philatelist.com/2019/05/16/pakistan-atoms-for-peace-poliferates-until-buddha-smiles/ .
Mr. Bhabha made optimistic projections of how much nuclear energy India could produce. A projection made by him in 1962 gave a number by 1980 that is a full five times what is actually produced in the India of 2020. Less than 3 percent of Indian electricity comes from nuclear power. It was of course, all about the bombs.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another in case the power goes out. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.