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As inextricable part of modernity, technology is pursued for multiple rewards: enhancing knowledge, gaining power and respect, improving human life and work. Between nations and societies, acquiring technology has more than an economic meaning- it is a way of boosting one's status. Nuclear energy as a special case marked the development of postwar societies possessing it. As military application, during the Cold War and after, nuclear deterrence spelled a strategic language that set apart nuclear governments from those deprived of the bomb. For smaller, decolonized countries, acquiring nuclear technology with both civil and military ends symbolized a statement of their sovereignty and an assurance against superpower interference. Such is the case for the Indian post 1947 nuclear history. Using Thorstein's Veblen notion of conspicuous consumption, the present article will try to answer to the question why the elites from New Delhi did not build from the beginning thorium based nuclear reactors, even though India possess rich deposits of such metal and Homi Bhaba's plan envisaged thorium grid infrastructures. We will show that the Indian nuclear research turned to uranium following a similar path with Western and Soviet industrial build-up. As uranium is much easier to weaponise than thorium, Indian political and scientific elites wanted fungibility between their civil and their military structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Vizianagaram area (E 83°29.442′; N 18°5.418′) of the Eastern Ghats Belt, India, a suite of graphite-bearing calc-silicate granulites, veined by syenitic rocks, developed wollastonite-rich veins at 6–7 kbar and > 850 °C. During subsequent near-isobaric cooling wollastonite was replaced by calcite + quartz and a graphic intergrowth of fluorite + quartz ± clinopyroxene. Titanite with variable Al and F contents is present throughout the rock. Combining the compositional variation of titanite and recent experimental data, it is demonstrated that the mineral assemblage, the composition of coexisting fluids and the mobility of Al exert a far greater control on the composition of titanite than pressure, temperature or the whole rock composition. Thermodynamically computed isothermal–isobaric log fO2– log fCO2 and log fF2– log fO2 grids in the systems Ca–Fe–Si–O–F (CISOF; calcite-free) and Ca–Fe–Si–O–F–C–H (CISOFV; calcite-present) demonstrate the influence of bulk rock and fluid compositions on the stability of the fluorite-bearing assemblages in diverse geological environments and resolve the problem of the stability of titanite in fayalite + fluorite-bearing rocks in the Adirondacks. The mineralogy of the studied rocks and the topological constraints tightly fix the log fO2, log fF2 and log fCO2 at −15.8, −30.6 and 4.1, respectively, at 6.5 kbar and c. 730 °C. Because of the similarity in the P–T conditions, the compositions of pore fluids in the fluorite-bearing assemblages of the Adirondacks and the Eastern Ghats Belt have been compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]