War And Peace

Respected documentarian Anand Patwardhan's two-part chronicle of the anti-nuclear weapons movement in India is a quiet, melancholy plea for an end to the perilous game of nuclear one-upmanship between India and Pakistan and, by extension, the world. India conducted its first underground nuclear test in 1974, at the Pokaran test site in the Rajasthan desert; the code phrase for success was "Buddha is smiling." But the disarmament movement Patwardhan examines was galvanized by a series of 1998 tests, which provoked reciprocal testing in Pakistan and raised the possibility that neither country would stop at nuclear saber-rattling. The 1999 Kargil War, which brought Indi...