Truth bombs about climate change

If United States President Donald Trump's imposition of 25 per cent tariffs on all Indian imports — to penalise India for its protected economy and for buying military equipment and energy from Russia — seems like bullying, let us pause to consider what happened when the US negotiated a deal with India in 1985.

- Chintan Girish Modi

This event from four decades ago seems instructive for anyone who believes that the relationship between the two countries has suddenly hit a new low.

Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, tells this incredible story in his memoir A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory. Apparently, in 1985, over tea at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi told President Ronald Reagan that India needed a supercomputer for monsoon forecasting. Reagan agreed. However, his "national security council and other federal agencies...tried to dissuade him from approving the sale". Reagan kept his word but not before getting India to comply with "a few humiliating stipulations", as Dr Shukla puts it.

India could buy a supercomputer, a Cray X-MP/14, by paying the "full list price — about ten million dollars", and securing the facility that would house the computer with fences and rifle-wielding guards. Only Cray employees and American citizens were permitted to enter. The agreement was that no one of Indian origin, except Dr Shukla, would be allowed near the machine. He was not an American citizen then but he was working at the University of Maryland, and had worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration earlier.