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Out of the Nuclear Shadow edited by Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian, Zed Books,
£16.95, ISBN 1842770594

Nuclear weapons “bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our
brains”, says celebrated Indian author Arundhati Roy. They pervade our politics,
suffuse our thinking and may determine our fate.

Roy wants rid of them, as do the other 42 Indian and Pakistani writers who
contributed to Out of the Nuclear Shadow, an eclectic collection of
anti-nuclear essays. Including works by Mahatma Ghandi and Eqbal Ahmad, it
exposes the cold war doctrine of nuclear deterrence as a myth, and shows that
the huge resources soaked up by nuclear weapons deprive people of food, homes
and education. Atomic bombs are not a guarantee of life, but a harbinger of
death.

Roy fears that the nuclear test explosions by India and Pakistan in May 1998
have greatly increased the risk of nuclear war in South Asia. And it is Western
nations like the US and Britain who first planted the nuclear meat hooks in our
brains. They are ultimately to blame. “They stand on the world’s stage stark
naked but entirely unembarrassed, because they know that they have more money,
more food and bigger bombs than anybody else,” writes Roy. “They know that they
can wipe us out in the course of an ordinary working day.” Our best hope for the
future is that the combined strength, rigour and passion of these activists,
journalists and scientists will persuade India and Pakistan of the terrible
mistake they are making.