What did Homi Jehangir Bhabha invented?
Bhabha was born in 1909, of a wealthy well connected Parsi
family. Bhabha's uncle was Sir Dorab Tata (married to Bhabha's
father's sister), son of the founder of the powerful Tata group.
Bhabha grew up in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) while his father was
inspector general of education in Mysore.
In 1927, at age 18, Bhabha sailed to England to study
engineering at Cambridge. He soon decided that his true interest
was in nuclear physics, a field then flowering with Cambridge as
one of its centers. Bhabha received a Ph.D. in physics from
Cambridge University in 1935, studying the physics of cosmic rays.
While in Europe he met many of the greatest physicists of the day,
who would later play major roles in the US-UK wartime atomic weapon
programs -- among them Niels Bohr, James Franck, and Enrico Fermi.
Bhabha was well respected within the international physics
community, and has left his name associated with the phenomenon of
Bhabha electron scattering. One of Bhabha's friendships at
Cambridge would later play a prominent role in the development of
India's nuclear program - his friendship with his rowing teammate
W.B. Lewis, later chairman of the Canadian Energy Programme.
Bhabha learned of the discovery of fission while abroad. He
returned to India in 1939, taking the post of Reader in Theoretical
Physics at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore
under Nobel laureate Sir C.V. Raman.
Bhabha showed an immediate visionary interest in nuclear
technology, apparently independently detecting the existence of the
Manhattan Project during the war by noticing the absence of
publications from the leading physicists with which he was
acquainted. In March 1944, even before the successful achievement
of a chain reaction became publicly known, Bhabha wrote a proposal
to the Tata Trust that led to the establishment of an institute for
nuclear research in India. This institute, the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research (TIFR) named for Bhabha's uncle, was created
on 19 December 1945 in Mumbai with Dr. Bhabha as its Director. And
so from the very outset, only four months after Hiroshima and years
before India became an independent nation, Bhabha was already in
command of India's nuclear future. And so he remained until the
moment of his death over 20 years later.
Bhabha was acquainted with India's first Prime Minister
Jawarhalal Pandit Nehru, having met him on the voyage home in 1939.
After Nehru became the new nation's first leader Bhabha was
entrusted with complete authority over all nuclear related affairs
and programs and answered only to Nehru himself, with whom he
developed a close personal relationship. All Indian nuclear policy
was set by unwritten personal understandings between Nehru and
Bhabha.
From the outset Bhabha's plans for India where extraordinarily
ambitious. In April 1948 Nehru agreed to legislate at Bhabha's
request the Atomic Energy Act in the Constituent Assembly, creating
the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC).
On 3 January 1954 the IAEC decided to set up a new facility -
the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET), later to become
the "Indian Los Alamos". On 3 August 1954 the Department of Atomic
Energy (DAE) was created with Dr. Bhabha as Secretary. This
department answered directly to the Prime Minister and has
continued to do so down to the present day.
Bhabha personally recruited and sponsored many of the principal
players in the successful efforts to develop and test nuclear
weapons such as Homi Sethna, P.K. Iyengar (hired 1952), Vasudev
Iya, and Raja Ramanna -- hired by Bhabha in 1949 and given a J.N.
Tata scholarship at King's College in London.
Ramanna confirms that Bhabha planned from the very outset to
establish an Indian nuclear weapons capability. Bhabha told Ramanna
during that period that"We must have the capability. We should
first prove ourselves and then talk of Gandhi, non-violence and a
world without nuclear weapons."
[Chengappa 2000; pg. 82].
Although Nehru founded the non-aligned movement, and generally
promoted disarmament efforts, his biographer S. Gopal stated in
1997 that Nehru actually opposed complete abolition of nuclear
weapons [Chengappa 2000, pg. 83], and supported Bhabha's plans for
developing an Indian nuclear weapons option.
In 1955 Bhabha's personal relationsip with Lewis was
instrumental in the program to build Cirus, the Canadian heavy
water reactor - ostensibly for peaceful research but desired by
India for its potential as an ideal system for producing weapons
grade plutonium, a capability later exploited.
The power that Bhabha held is no where more sharply illustrated
by the fact that in the wake of China's first nuclear test PM Lal
Bahadur Shastri, Nehru's successor, found it necessary to align his
policies with the preferences of Dr. Bhabha, and secure his
personal endorsement to withstand legislative and public
criticism.
The earlier pattern of Bhabha and the Prime Minister privately
setting Indian nuclear policy, which had been established under
Nehru, continued under Shastri. This pattern had disastrous results
in 1966 when PM Shastri died of a heart attack, on 11 January 1966,
and just two weeks later on January 24, a day after Shastri's
successor Indira Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister, Dr. Homi
Bhabha was killed while on a trip to Europe when the plane in which
he was flying collided with Mount Blanc. India's impressively large
nuclear establishment was suddenly left without any plan or policy
to give it direction.
On 12 January 1967 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi renamed the
Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay -- India's premier nuclear
center, and weapon development laboratory -- to be the Bhabha
Atomic Research Centre (BARC).
