Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, 6 February 1950 — continued
Bhabha didn't go back to the blackboard immediately. He went instead to a cabinet along the far wall, the kind of battered steel almirah that every government office in the country seemed to own at least one of, and came back with a rolled survey map that he spread across the bench between them, weighing down its curling corners with whatever was closest to hand — a Geiger counter on one side, a half-empty teacup on the other.
"You asked for the hundred-year answer," he said, smoothing the paper flat. "Here it is, more or less. The coastline of Travancore. The coastline of Orissa, south of Puri. Monazite sand, Prime Minister — black, heavy, and sitting in dunes along our own shoreline in quantities that would make a European geologist weep with envy. We are, by a very wide margin, the richest thorium nation on this earth. Richer than anyone. It isn't close."
Anirban studied the map, the long curling line of coast marked in a dense cross-hatch that Bhabha had clearly had someone shade in by hand. "Richer than our uranium problem is poor."
"Considerably richer," Bhabha said, and there was something almost unseemly in how much pleasure he took in saying it, after an hour spent delivering nothing but bad news. "Which gives us an advantage no other nation building a nuclear program actually has, if we're patient enough to use it properly. Thorium itself is nearly useless as a reactor fuel directly — it won't sustain a chain reaction on its own, not the way uranium-235 will. But bombard it with neutrons from something that *can* sustain a reaction, and it transmutes. Thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, decays twice, and becomes uranium-233 — a fissile isotope every bit as usable as the uranium-235 we can't easily get our hands on, bred from a mineral we are, quite literally, standing on top of."
He tapped the map, then straightened, and began to pace the narrow strip of floor between the bench and the window, the particular restless motion of a man who thought better on his feet than seated.
"So the plan has three parts, and I'd ask you to be patient with me, because the first part is the slowest and least satisfying of the three." He held up one finger. "Stage one. We build reactors running on our natural uranium — whatever we can scrape from Jaduguda, whatever Rum Jungle eventually sends us — moderated by the heavy water we've just found a way to actually manufacture, thanks to your cable to Bonn. These reactors do two things at once. They generate power, which this country desperately needs more of regardless of anything else we're discussing. And as a byproduct of simply running, they produce plutonium."
A second finger. "Stage two. We take that plutonium — not India's abundant resource, but a resource we've bred ourselves rather than imported — and we use it to fuel a different kind of reactor entirely. A fast breeder, surrounded by a blanket of thorium rather than more uranium. The plutonium sustains the reaction. The thorium blanket absorbs the neutron flux the reaction throws off, and transmutes, slowly, into uranium-233."
A third finger, and here his voice dropped, the register of a man finally arriving at the sentence he'd been building toward all afternoon. "Stage three. Reactors running on uranium-233, bred from thorium, which in turn breeds more uranium-233 from more thorium than we could burn through in several centuries at any pace of consumption I can currently imagine. At that point, Prime Minister, we are no longer a nation worrying about where its next shipment of fissile material is coming from. We are a nation sitting on a fuel supply that effectively does not run out. Not in your lifetime. Not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive in this country."
He let that sit in the room for a moment, watching Anirban's face with the particular attention of a man gauging whether he'd oversold something, and finding, apparently, that he hadn't.
"It will take decades," Bhabha added, quieter now, almost an apology for the scale of what he'd just described. "I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. The breeder technology alone is a generation of engineering we haven't begun. But every stage of it rests on something we are either already building or already sitting on top of, which is more than I can say for any of the alternatives Washington or Moscow are currently pursuing with uranium reserves they'll exhaust decades before we exhaust ours."
Anirban looked at the map for a long moment — the dark hatching along two coastlines, one in the south, one curving east past the mouth of the Mahanadi — and thought, not for the first time that afternoon, of a sentence from another life, read once in a journal article he could no longer place the name of, about a three-stage program that had taken his old timeline's India the better part of fifty years to fully articulate and considerably longer than that to build. He had known this was coming, in the vague way he knew the shape of many things without knowing the precise date they'd arrive. He had not expected to feel, hearing Bhabha describe it from first principles in a sunlit laboratory in 1950, quite so much like a man watching a rumor become a fact in real time.
"Then we start stage one in earnest, and we build the institutional home for stage three before we've even finished stage one," he said. "Because if we wait until the breeders are ready to start thinking seriously about where the thorium work happens, we'll have wasted the only advantage this country actually has — time, used properly, rather than time simply allowed to pass."
Bhabha's face did something complicated — surprise, then the particular satisfaction of a man discovering he didn't need to make the argument he'd been bracing to make. "You're ahead of me, Prime Minister. I was going to propose exactly that. There's a campus nearing completion on the Orissa coast, near Chhatrapur — close enough to the monazite dunes that we won't be shipping sand across half the subcontinent before we've even begun processing it. Indian Rare Earths has the mineral rights sorted, mostly, and the basic infrastructure is going up now. I'd like to see it become something distinct from this institute, not a satellite of TIFR but its own establishment entirely — mining science, monazite extraction chemistry, thorium metallurgy, and eventually, once we're further along, breeder physics itself. Everything this building does with uranium and cosmic rays, that one does with thorium and the sand it's built on."
"And you'd direct it yourself."
"I'd direct it as I direct this place — from a distance, with the right people underneath me who don't need me standing over their shoulder to get the chemistry right." Bhabha allowed himself a small, dry smile. "I'm aware that makes me a man trying to run two institutes and sit on the Department of The Atomic Energy simultaneously, Prime Minister. I'm also aware that's rather the only way anything gets built quickly in this country at the moment. Delegation is a luxury we'll be able to afford once we have more than a handful of people who actually understand this field."
Anirban almost laughed — the first real levity of the entire afternoon — and found himself, for a moment, simply enjoying the particular company of a man whose ambitions ran at roughly the same unreasonable scale as his own. "You're not the only one carrying three jobs at once, Bhabha. I'd be a poor example to hold anyone to a lighter standard than the one I'm holding myself to."
"No," Bhabha agreed. "Which is, I suspect, exactly why this conversation has taken as long as it has and produced as much as it has. Most Prime Ministers would have sent a secretary to hear this." He rolled the map halfway closed, then stopped, and something shifted in his tone — the briefing register dropping away into something more like simple, unguarded enthusiasm, a colleague sharing gossip rather than a minister delivering a report. "Speaking of people running at an unreasonable scale — have you had any word from Ahmedabad lately? From Sarabhai?"
"Only secondhand. Menon mentioned something before he left for Europe, though I confess I didn't follow all of it."
"You should follow all of it, Prime Minister, because it's rather extraordinary." Bhabha's enthusiasm here was unmistakably genuine, the warmth of one brilliant man talking about another he had no professional reason to feel threatened by. "Vikram set up his laboratory in '47 to study cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere — a perfectly respectable, perfectly modest ambition, instruments on mountaintops measuring particles falling out of the sky. Except Vikram has never in his life been satisfied measuring something from the ground when he could instead send an instrument up to meet it. When I last saw him he told me he has a proposal and everything calculated what wanted to do and he send that to you, after that I don't saw him in this passing months, occasionally i hear his work from Bhatnagar. I hear He's building a test facility outside Ahmedabad — static stands, he's calling them, to fire small rocket motors under controlled conditions and measure exactly how they behave before anyone trusts one enough to actually launch it. Metallurgy labs beside the stands, because half his present difficulty isn't the chemistry of the propellant at all, it's finding alloys for the combustion chamber that don't simply deform or crack the moment you ask them to hold back that kind of pressure and heat at once."
"Sounding rockets," Anirban said. "For the upper atmosphere work."
"It's Officially, yes — instruments carried high enough to measure cosmic ray flux and atmospheric ionization directly, rather than inferring it from a balloon or a mountain station. Vikram would tell you, quite sincerely, that the entire program exists to serve the physics." Bhabha's eyes carried the particular glint of a man who suspected there was more to a colleague's ambition than the colleague himself was willing to say out loud. "I happen to think Vikram Sarabhai is not a man who builds a rocket motor test stand because he's interested exclusively in where a cosmic ray came from, Prime Minister. I think he's a man who has looked at the sky the way I've looked at that coastline, and seen something considerably larger than what he's currently permitted to say he's building."
Anirban said nothing to that, though something in his expression must have given him away, because Bhabha studied him for a moment with the same careful, assessing look he'd worn earlier in the conversation — the look of a man deciding, again, whether a politician's silence meant he knew more than he was letting on.
"You've gone very quiet, Prime Minister."
"I'm simply glad to hear it," Anirban said, which was true, and also considerably less than everything he might have said. "Well Sarabhai will have his instruments will have whatever metallurgy and machine support this government can arrange, the same as you will. I'd rather this country have the beginnings of three difficult things running at once than wait patiently for one difficult thing to finish before starting the next."
"Speaking of difficult things running at once," Bhabha said, with the air of a man changing the subject only because the previous one had clearly reached the edge of what either of them wanted to discuss aloud, "your industrial people are having a rather less philosophical time of it than either of us this month. I had a letter last week from one of the engineers managing the German equipment coming off the ships at Calcutta — half of it is still sitting in customs sheds because nobody can agree on installation schedules for machine tools nobody in this country has ever operated before. He sounded considerably more harried than either of us."
"He's not alone," Anirban said. "Every ministry that opened a new door this winter is now discovering what it costs to actually walk through it." He began rolling his own notes together, the particular motion of a man who had gotten everything out of a room that the room currently had to give. "Write me the thorium proposal properly, Bhabha — campus staffing, the mining partnership with Indian Rare Earths, a construction timeline for Chhatrapur I can defend in Cabinet without anyone accusing me of building monuments instead of reactors."
Bhabha walked him to the door, the harbor beyond the window gone fully dark now, Bombay's evening lights beginning to prick on along the shoreline in the particular scattered, unhurried way of a city settling into its own version of night. At the threshold, he paused, and for a moment the carefully composed diplomat-scientist fell away entirely, replaced by something plainer and more tired.
"This institutes, Prime Minister. Uranium in Bombay, thorium in Orissa, and whatever Sarabhai is quietly building toward in Ahmedabad that neither of us is quite willing to name yet. I sometimes wonder if this country understands what it's actually assembling, piece by piece, while everyone's attention is still on harvests and borders."
"It doesn't need to understand yet," Anirban said. "It only needs us to keep building it properly until the day it does."
He left Bhabha standing in the doorway of a laboratory that smelled of chalk and salt air, and walked out into a Bombay evening that looked, to anyone watching from the street, like nothing more than a Prime Minister leaving a long and unremarkable meeting at a university — which was, in its way, exactly the impression three different institutes across three different coasts of India were all, very deliberately, being built to give.