The world could have been a more peaceful place…

The world could have been so different if Sir CP (as he is known in Travancore and the rest of Kerala, and not the technically more correct Sir Ramaswamy), Diwan of the princely state, was able to persuade Albert Einstein to head the newly started University of Travancore. It was 1937, and Einstein was already at Princeton for several years. He was not welcome in Nazi Germany being a Jew and the establishment looked askance at him in the US because of his well known pacifist leanings. He could have travelled to God’s Own Country (though nobody knew about the divine nature of the land till the adman researched it out a few years ago). After all, Jews were living in this land, er, a few hundred thousand metres away from the seat of the new University, peacefully without any pogroms, for two millennia. And the people of Travancore had been “pacified” by the East India Company’s arms more than a hundred years earlier after Velu Thampi’s revolt. The state army had been disbanded and only a ceremonial vestige remained.

Nuclear fission of uranium had already been realised by Fermi, but he never knew it because he “did not know enough chemistry”. Meitner and Frisch discovered the fact only in 1938 by which time Einstein would be ensconced from all sorts of Nazis, Fascisti and warmongers in his tropical paradise in the low rolling hills of Trivandrum. He would not have signed the Szilard letter to Roosevelt and the Manhattan project would not have got started and the atom bomb would not have been made. He would be playing Swati Thirunal’s ragas on his violin against the backdrop of the peaceful waves of the Arabian Sea.

Germany was any way doomed to be carpet-bombed by the British and their more efficient and resource-rich American allies. Notwithstanding Kamikaze fighters, Japan would be bombarded flat by the warships of the US from the sea and their bombers from the air, and her armies in Asia blasted out by the cannon fodder provided by the British colonies. All with conventional explosives, and the bamboos of South East Asia.

No one would have heard of doctrines of nuclear “deterrence” or  mutual assured destruction. Nor dirty bombs in the hands of terrorists. In fact, not afraid of a US with its atom bombs, Stalin might well have annexed the whole of Asia and the Middle East to his Gulag paradise and there would have been no terrorists.

Kipling would have been happy that all was well with the world. And there would be peace for all men of good will…

Tailpiece: Since nuclear chain reaction would not have been achieved at all, the people of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Jaitapur and Koodamkulam would have slept sound.