May 20, 1998 (NYT)
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam: Self-Made Bomb
Maker
By JOHN F. BURNS
EW DELHI, India -- Among the Indian scientists who successfully detonated five nuclear
tests in the northwestern desert last week, none seemed more visibly delighted by the
acclaim waiting in New Delhi than Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. An impish, shaggy-haired
bachelor, Kalam is widely regarded as the central figure in India's drive to join the small club of
nuclear-armed nations.
Kalam, 66, has never hidden the passion for a powerful India that has driven him since he was
growing up in a poor family on the coast of Tamil Nadu. Among colleagues a new word,
"kalamitous," was coined to capture the outspokenness with which Kalam greeted each new
delay in the tests, or in getting the money to develop the missiles to deliver nuclear bombs.
When he returned to New Delhi over the weekend from the test site in Rajasthan, Kalam found
himself a national hero, applauded and besieged for autographs, though the tests drew
widespread condemnation in the rest of the world.
"We must think and act like a nation of a billion people, and not like that of a million people," he
said. "Dream, dream, dream! Conduct these dreams into thought, and then transform them into
action."
Only a few years ago, Kalam became so frustrated with the reluctance of successive
governments to approve nuclear tests that he came close to quitting as the government's top
scientific adviser to become vice chancellor of the University of Madras. On Sunday, when he
appeared with other members of India's nuclear team at a news conference, nobody was
surprised when Kalam stole the show with his readiness to flirt with political issues.
In the middle of a baffling exposition on "sub-critical fissionable materials" and "electronic
arming and fusing sub-systems," Kalam turned to a favorite political topic -- how a
nuclear-armed India will be free of the fear of foreign invasions, which have constantly
remolded the ancient Hindu civilization as armies of Macedonians, Persians, Afghans and Britons
swept into the north.
"For 2,500 years India has never invaded anybody," he said. "But others have come here, so
many others have come."
For many Indians, the references to invasions, many by Muslims, underscored an aspect about
Kalam that is almost as engaging as his unguarded remarks, a biographical fact that is rarely
mentioned: Like the captain of the national cricket team, like some of India's top generals and
newspaper editors and diplomats, like many of its top film-makers and artists, Kalam is one of
the 120 million Muslims in a nation of 700 million Hindus.
As India celebrated its arrival as a nuclear-arms power, some said Kalam's role meant the world
now has an "Islamic bomb," but one that belongs to India -- an India ruled by Hindu
nationalists. The term "Islamic bomb" describes the yearning among some of the world's one
billion Muslims for the development of nuclear weapons by a Muslim country, most likely
Pakistan, India's arch-rival, which is considering whether to respond to the Indian tests with
one of its own.
But though Kalam is an observant Muslim, his attitudes and tastes speak of his immersion in the
broader culture of India.
He is an avid reader of ancient Hindu scriptures. He has published poems in Tamil, his first
language. And one of his pastimes in his modest walk-up apartment in New Delhi is plucking a
veena, a stringed instrument with a curved musical box at each end that is associated with Shiva,
a Hindu god who is regarded as both creator and destroyer.
According to one Indian biography, Kalam knows by heart sections of the best-known of all of
Hinduism's sacred books, the Bhagavad-Gita. If so, this would give him another link to Robert
Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the team that tested the first American atomic bomb, in the
New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. According to some accounts, after the pre-dawn flash
signaled the birth of the atomic age, Oppenheimer quoted a line attributed to Shiva in the
Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
A line in one of Kalam's poems suggests that he, like Oppenheimer, has agonized over the moral
aspect of his work. Before becoming the chief scientific adviser and leader of the
nuclear-weapons team, Kalam was best known as a missile engineer, working on the program
that launched India's first space satellites, and later as the head of the team that developed and
test-fired missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads.
In an English translation, the poem, "Tumult," asks: "Did I explore space to enhance science, or
did I provide weapons of destruction?"
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was born on Oct. 15, 1931, on Dhanushkodi, an island off
Tamil Nadu, where his father rented a boat to fishermen who worked the narrow strait between
India and what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.
Some accounts have said that Kalam's affection for Hinduism developed when a primary-school
teacher separated him as a Muslim and placed him at the back of a classroom, prompting tears
from a Brahmin boy who was his best friend. Later the Brahmin boy's father, spotting scientific
ability in the young Kalam, helped pay for him to go to a Roman Catholic high school and to
college.
Kalam has said his ambition was fired by an article about the Supermarine Spitfire, Britain's
front-line fighter during World War II, that he read as a small boy delivering a local Tamil
newspaper.
Later he studied aeronautical engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology, but did not
attempt a doctorate. (He has since garnered many honorary degrees.)
His only extended period abroad came when he was part of a five-man Indian team invited to
spend four months visiting space research centers in the United States in the early 1960s, during
the first years of the American manned-space program.
Several of the Indian scientists who led the nuclear test team, including Dr. Rajagopal
Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, did post-graduate studies in the
United States, as did many of the scientists who have worked on Pakistan's nuclear program.
But Kalam has insisted that India has achieved its successes in missile development and
bomb-building substantially unaided, apart from some early assistance in rocketry from the
United States and the Soviet Union.
As for himself, he says, "I am completely indigenous!" |
