They tell you, politely, that the world is what it is: messy, dangerous, and therefore to be managed by people who have seen the maps and read the books. Questioning the necessity of weapons that can erase cities, nuclear weapons, the all-consuming instruments of modern statecraft, will earn you a kind of medical diagnosis: idealism, romanticism, unreality. It is a social sanction dressed up as technical critique. Whoever says “that’s not war, it’s mass murder” is judged not as a moralist but as someone who lacks the temperament, the seriousness, the realism that is a credential in the public square. That rebuke is itself a political technology: it converts dissent into a disorder, skepticism into an affective deficiency. It keeps the conversation inside the room where the launch codes are kept.
Romanticizing war is not an accident of culture; it is the necessary lubricant of its machinery. Nations cannot wage, or even prepare for, catastrophic violence without first reframing it as noble, inevitable, and somehow beautiful. India’s first underground test, on May 18, 1974, carried the gentle sobriquet “Smiling Buddha,” an oxymoron that instantly reframed the act of controlled explosion as a civilizational proof rather than a violent rupture. The later, more theatrical Pokhran-II tests of 1998, five detonations declared by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to mark India’s arrival as a full nuclear state, were not only strategic acts; they were a communicative event, a moment when the state performed power for itself and for the world. Those tests were followed by a flood of celebration and approval in much of the national media.
Names matter. Call a weapon “Smiling Buddha” and you have already blurred the contours between devoutness and demolition. Call five simultaneous detonations an operation of national technology and heroism, and the dehumanizing arithmetic of blast yield and fallout becomes a narrative about engineers, patriotism, and scientific dignity. Film and television have long understood this rhetorical alchemy. And we’ve always been suckers for a good war story. Bollywood’s parade of patriotic thrillers, a spate that reached a certain apex in films explicitly about Pokhran, treats the acquisition of nuclear capability as an odyssey of national maturity. Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran is the most literal example: it frames the test as a spy-thriller rescue of national honour and depicts the scientists and soldiers as protagonists in a moral drama about sovereignty. That is the cinematic pattern: the bomb is not a moral problem but the prop that proves the hero’s worth.
The scholar Benedict Anderson famously called nations “imagined communities,” sustained by shared myths and rituals. Nuclear capability becomes one such ritualized myth: a secular relic paraded at Republic Day, narrated in school textbooks, and inscribed in the speeches of prime ministers. In this telling, the warhead is the final punctuation mark in the sentence of independence, the moment we are no longer just free, but feared.
This aestheticizing process makes dissent almost impossible to stage. In strategic studies, to question deterrence is to violate the orthodoxy of realism, the school of thought that insists the world is an anarchic system in which only military strength ensures survival. To be anti-war in this frame is not simply to hold a different opinion; it is to misunderstand reality itself.
There is a literary and intellectual lineage for rejecting that story. From the late twentieth century onward, commentators and scholars warned that the logic of deterrence is stunningly brittle. Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan, two of the most prominent interlocutors in the field, argued with each other about proliferation: whether more nuclear states made the world stable, or whether organizations and human error made proliferation dangerous. Sagan, in particular, used organizational theory to show how accidents, miscommunication, and bureaucratic incentives can defeat the neat rationality that deterrence presupposes. The point here is sobering: the doctrine that promises to keep us safe depends on an impossible level of perpetual rationality among a great many fallible people. The fact that someone can be told they are “unrealistic” for pointing this out is itself evidence that rhetoric has displaced reasoning.
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the great black satirical forecast of an insane rationality, imagined political leaders who could gloat over annihilation as if it were a boardroom triumph. At one point, the President insists not to be remembered as “the greatest mass murderer since Hitler,” only to be told it might be better if he cared more for the American people than his place in history. That exchange is the heart of Kubrick’s satire: leaders measure their legacy while the world measures its last seconds.
In its famous coda, Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again plays over a montage of nuclear explosion footage. Kubrick wanted us to laugh until the laugh curdled into horror. The film’s real revelation, however, is not just that the bomb is catastrophic, but that it is catastrophic in the hands of men who are themselves catastrophes: a general obsessed with bodily fluids, a President powerless to stop bureaucratic inertia, a scientist still in love with fascism. It is the perfect dramatization of Sagan’s warning: rational deterrence collapses the moment it collides with human paranoia. The film’s punchline is not that leaders are mad but that modernity has found a way to make annihilation administratively quotidian.
This is where the romanticization begins to look like a public-health problem. Romanticization is not merely the cinematic glamour placed over uniforms or the idealized portrait of soldiers as tragic Adonises; it is the systematic aestheticization of violence so that violence becomes legible as virtue. Republic Day floats glide by with missile columns, and missile names read like missile couture. The Agni family of missiles, for instance, becomes a parade prop rather than a potential vector of mass death, its tubular elegance photographed for the morning papers and its range listed like a car’s horsepower in an auto review. What we see is choreography: ordnance on wheels, strategic posture as pageant. The choreography permits a particular kind of national reverie, one in which sovereignty is measured by the arc of a missile on a parade ground rather than the arc of suffering in its blast zone.
To be skeptical of that reverie invites a special kind of contempt. After the 1998 tests, television and newspapers largely echoed a celebratory national tone; critical voices in civil society, intellectuals, and even some scientists were marginalized and ridiculed. Those dissenters were painted as either sentimental or strategically naive, sometimes accused of being “anti-national.” Consider the cultural penalty leveled at public intellectuals who questioned the tests: moral argument was recoded as emotional feebleness, and disagreements about policy were transfigured into questions of loyalty.
Social media only amplified what the television studios had started. On platforms like Instagram and Twitter, reels and shareable clips compress a complex debate into a punchline. A reel that loops at the precise cadence of a nationalist jingle can turn a conversation about morality into a meme about toughness. “You don’t understand geopolitics,” the reply reads, a kind of automated social rebuke that functions more to disqualify than to engage.
There is, too, the domestic profit motive: the militarized economy. Eisenhower’s warning in 1961 about the “military-industrial complex” was offered precisely to name the institutional entanglement of profit, policy, and persuasion, and that entanglement has only grown. When defense contracts sustain regions, jobs, academic programs, and political careers, the question of whether a weapon should exist is refracted through a thousand private interests. That is not conspiracy thinking; it is basic political economy. In democratic societies, the machinery of war accrues its own constituencies: scientists and engineers, contractors and lobbyists, retired generals who become security analysts on prime-time shows. Each constituency has an institutional reason to minimize the moral cost of weapons that enrich them. The cultural smoothing that calls a warhead an instrument of pride functions conveniently to the ledger books of those who profit.
This is why the “realist” charge that stifles dissent is itself performative. To insist on realism is often to misname a moral preference as technical necessity. Realism is deployed as a strategic rhetorical posture: it claims that only those initiated in the cold arithmetic of power are entitled to speak. Yet realism, in this deployable form, is a narrow club. It excludes questions that do not fit the graph paper of strategic studies: What about the civilian populations whose lives are not on any strategic map? What about the environmental and intergenerational harms that a nuclear exchange would imply? What about the ethical logic of holding a population hostage in order to secure political advantage?
We can name the forms of cultural and institutional complicity with greater precision. There is the aesthetic complicity, the photographs, the cinematic montages, the reels, that transform instruments of destruction into symbols of modernity. There is the bureaucratic complicity, the state’s careful production of metaphors (Smiling Buddha; Operation Shakti) that convert technical acts into national narratives. There is the market complicity, corporations and contractors who profit from weapons and thus frame them as industries of innovation rather than industries of death. There is the social complicity, the public’s psychological appetite for a story in which potency substitutes for justice, in which deterrence stands in for diplomacy. Taken together, these produce a culture in which the bomb is not merely tolerated but actively beautified.
Yet for all this beautification, the bomb is a moral singularity: an instrument whose primary design is to erase human futures. It is a logic that cannot be entirely aestheticized away. The intellectual literature on nuclear danger is full of near-religious metaphors, “sacred” as well as “profane,” because the stakes are absolute. The critical voices that get shamed as naïve are often those who, precisely, are attending to magnitude, to scale, to the human geometry that deterrence rhetoric wants to compress into equations. M. V. Ramana, for instance, a physicist who has persistently critiqued nuclear policy in India, has framed the tests and the program as misdirected and costly, arguments that are both technical and ethical. Those critiques are not embellished sentiments; they are careful reckonings with probability, engineering constraints, economic cost, and moral consequence. Yet their audience is often those already willing to hear.
If the romanticization of war is structural, it is also pedagogical. Citizens learn how to feel about weapons from the rituals of the state and the scripts of culture. We internalize a version of citizenship that equates strength with responsibility and omission with cowardice. This pedagogy trains a specific kind of national imagination: one in which territory is a narrative to be defended at any cost, and where the technologies of annihilation are converted into technologies of status. There are few public rituals that teach restraint; there are many that teach display.
And there is a final, bitter irony: the normalization of the bomb is itself a new vulnerability. If public sentiment accepts annihilation as a background condition, if it is habituated to the aesthetic of the missile and the image of the mushroom cloud, then the political costs of an accidental escalation decline. A society that treats the bomb as an accessory is less likely to demand the painstaking controls, transparency, and diplomatic channels that make accidents less likely. We sanitize the monster and thereby diminish the urgency of the guardrails that protect us all.
What is the corrective? It will not arrive as a slogan or as a law alone. It must be cultural and institutional at once. It must be a new pedagogy of limits, an insistence that power is not an aesthetic but a responsibility. It must be a politics that refuses the shorthand “realism” as the only legitimate domain of debate and insists that moral imagination, the capacity to imagine survivors and victims, not merely strategic outcomes, is a form of knowledge in its own right. It must be a media culture that treats skepticism not as sentimental failure but as a civic virtue. And it must be a marketplace that does not transform devices of mass death into consumer novelties.
The question for a republic is whether it will re-educate its appetite for spectacle or remain content with the glamour of impotence disguised as power. If we are to survive the ethical geometry of the nuclear age, we will have to relearn, collectively, how to be both realistic and moral: to accept the complexities of deterrence without allowing those complexities to silence the voice that dares to say, plainly, we ought not to love the thing that can make us not exist. And this is what Dr. Strangelove reminds us: the true danger is not the bomb itself, but the men who cradle it in their sweaty palms, convinced that their paranoia is patriotism. This is precisely why Kubrick’s satire endures. It is a pedagogy in reverse. Instead of teaching reverence for the bomb, it teaches suspicion of it by showing that the men who claim to control it are the least trustworthy of all.
And that is how I learnt how to stop applauding and fear the bomb.
