History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
– James Joyce in Ulysses

Studying India’s nuclear history and    policy is no easy task. With the government unwilling to allow access to most of its records and the imposition of secrecy through the 1962 Atomic Energy Act and the Official Secrets Act, obtaining documentary evidence is all but impossible. For the most part, what passes off as history, as scholar Itty Abraham points out, is the Indian state’s “sanitised official narrative of scientific and peaceful progress... interspersed with diplomatic feats of non-aligned and non-nuclear India”.