Which religious traditions have most impacted nuclear policy? In light of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the Christian faiths of Russia and America, the two original nuclear superpowers, might come to mind. Neither apocalyptic Evangelicals in the US nor the Kremlin-friendly Russian Orthodox Church have been shy in voicing their opinions on nukes. Another obvious contender might be theocratic Iran, where the Ayatollahs are purportedly just weeks away from acquiring the material needed for a bomb, believed by many to represent a victory for Islam. But historical research into the question of religious influence on nuclear arms yields another rather unexpected answer: the Hindu tradition has one of the strongest cases to make for influencing the history of nuclear decision-making.
Hindu-inflected political worldviews animated India’s approach to nuclear weapons in two highly consequential periods. In the decades following China’s successful nuclear tests in 1964, the legacy of Gandhian non-violence was instrumental in keeping India from fully arming when doing so was a clear strategic necessity. Yet in 1998, when the geopolitical costs of arming had risen above the benefits in most strategists’ estimations, India’s newly-elected Hindu nationalist government launched nuclear weapons tests—inspired in no small part by parallel Hindu religious perspectives that stood in opposition to those that restrained India from building nuclear weapons decades before.
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