ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rooppur: The Cold War History of Bangladesh’s New Nuclear Power Plant

• In Event: Cold War Science in Asia

English Abstract

Bangladesh is about to become the 32nd country in the world with an operational nuclear power plant (NPP). The Rooppur NPP is set to begin trial operation in December 2025 and commercial operation in December 2026. Built by Russia’s ROSATOM with a tripartite agreement involving India’s Department of Atomic Energy, this project is currently a multinational endeavor. The history of Rooppur, however, is even more international involving a wide range of national and global nuclear expert communities and dating back to the early 1960s when contemporary Bangladesh was East Pakistan. The Cold War story of Rooppur illustrates Bangladesh’s long, decolonial, and global nuclear history. Bengali scientists, engineers, and strategists contributed to British Indian and later Pakistani nuclear history before Bangladesh became a country. After the 1971 war, Bangladeshi nuclear experts continued and remade pieces of a formerly East Pakistani nuclear program for a newly independent Bangladesh. Pakistan’s nuclear development and planning were still heavily invested in East Pakistan until the end of 1971, including work on Rooppur. After independence, Bangladesh continued the project with repeated starts and stalls occurring through the 1990s. The varying momentum of twentieth-century nuclear work in Bangladesh exemplifies the shifting role of nuclear science and technology in new states navigating the U.S.-led international order that took shape after World War II. Cold War security and development cooperation went hand in hand, facilitating the spread and co-constitutive global development of nuclear knowledge and things. The eventual completion of the Rooppur NPP is an example of how Cold War histories continue to inform and structure nuclear policies and work today. This paper uses new archival materials produced by officials of the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission and Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to chronicle the twentieth-century history of nuclear Bangladesh’s Rooppur project.

Author

• Hannah Haegeland, Johns Hopkins University; Harvard University