ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides archival, ethnographic and textual analyses, much of the fieldwork and analysis being conducted during 2006–08 with periodic correspondence, research and short return visits to India until 2012. It focuses on the selective erasure of histories around atomic science: how the more idiosyncratic, ambivalent and negative views of atomic power articulated immediately after the dropping of the bomb have been side-lined in official, post-independence nationalist narratives which foregrounded the development of atomic power for socially constructive and peaceful purposes. The book examines how the atom bomb and the atomic metaphor became entangled with, and reproduced within the multi-media technologies of the culture industry from 1945 onwards. It also provides an overview of nuclear establishments in Bombay and focuses on the lifeworlds of nuclear scientists.
