The nuclear taboo is endemic of a colonial hegemony of time that reinforces civilizational mantras of the West vs. Rest while advancing logics of race science that castigate colonized peoples as technologically backwards.

It is with these questions and disposition that a postcolonial understanding of time is now acutely conscious of ‘the timing of decisions to acquire nuclear power’ and willing to complicate ‘our usual linear assumptions about the influence of the past on present and future.’226 A postcolonial understanding of time is willing to engage with the problem of heterotemporality.227 Thapar contends,

[T]ime concepts and historical change interact in as much as change can be projected as either repetitive, recurrent or periodic, pointing to a wide stretch of time concepts, ranging from what are viewed as the cyclical to the continuously progressive and directional, suggesting a linear form, with many in-between positions such as a wave or a spiral.228

Postcolonial scholars grappling with the problem of change in arms control and disarmament struggle to ‘dismantle fictions based on linear narrations’ and emphasize a need to ‘historicize the present.’229 But this effort to ‘historicize the present’ is critical of practices of historicism, as a mode of thinking, articulated in the temporal structure of the statement ‘First in the West, and then elsewhere.’230 These practices of historicism seek to provide ‘a frame of a single and secular historical time that envelops other kinds of time.’231 They produce ‘a zero point in history … a tabula rasa’ that prevents us from engaging with the problem of ‘temporal heterogeneity’ and ‘reduces the past to a nullity.’232

According to postcolonial scholars, this form of historicism has pernicious effects.233 These effects can be summarized as follows: First, it posits ‘historical time as a measure of cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West.’ Second, this denial of coevalness became the ground for legitimating ‘the idea of civilization’ in the colonies. Time management understood in terms of ‘the Victorian fetishes of discipline, routine and order management’’ are ‘now extolled as critical to the civilization of the country.’234 Third, it encouraged ‘internalist histories of Europe’ in which Europe became the site of ‘first occurrence’ with respect to each and every event of any historical significance.235 Fourth, it promoted the view that ‘to understand anything it has to be seen as a unity and in its historical development.’236 As a result, this form of historicist consciousness serves a ‘recommendation to the colonized to wait’ and encourages a ‘way of saying “not yet” to somebody else.’237 Fifth, this ‘not yet’ is reinforced with practices of anachronism that ‘circulate only in a mood of frustration, despair and resentment’ that seek to reify the past in terms of the West and the Rest.

A postcolonial critique of contemporary practices of historicism encourages us to problematize ‘dominant historical discourses’ and question ‘calcified nuclear histories.’238 The urgency of this task is articulated by Itty Abraham in the following words:

[A] discourse of “control,” authored by the overlapping narratives of academic proliferation studies and US antiproliferation policy, has come to dominate our understanding of nuclear histories. This discourse, with its primary purpose of seeking to predict which countries are likely to build nuclear weapons and thereby to threaten the prevailing military-strategic status-quo, has narrowed the gaze of nuclear historians.239

Abraham argues against practices of historicism that ‘desire to discipline,’ exhibit a ‘tendency to isolate’ and fail to appreciate any ‘excesses of meaning’ that might ‘flow’ from ‘ideas, rules, procedures and techniques’ that might give us ‘another history of nuclearism.’240 There is a further insistence that any endeavor to ‘open up nuclear history’ be willing to ‘explore its intimate relationship with the state project of legitimacy in the modern era.’241

In acknowledging this struggle for legitimacy and modernity, a critical disposition toward contemporary practices of historicism further encourages us to pause and recollect ‘politics as war’ discourses based on race not only radicalize differences between different identity groups, they also question ‘the purportedly inclusive and universalistic discourses on modern politics’ as being ‘partisan.’242 These politics as war discourses based on race serve as a ‘direct attack on the institutions and rationalizations of the modern sovereign state, including modern understandings of law.’243 The ‘political legitimacy’ of modern ‘laws and rights’ is not necessarily always based on the strength of one group over another, but on ‘pacified universality’ which can be denounced if we recognize discourses of law and rights as instruments of ongoing war by other means.244 To quote Julian Reid, ‘political sovereignty invests and takes over the decentering discourses of race struggle and turns it to its own universalizing ends.’245 To contest these universalizing claims, postcolonial time has to be cognizant of postcolonial science to interrogate ‘broad, cultural or civilizational conceptual frameworks limiting certain kinds of knowledge-seeking projects.’246

Sandra Harding observes that the West has ‘a problem figuring out how to refer to the science and technology tradition of other cultures.’247 It has tried to address this problem by conceptualizing and contrasting modern science and the ‘rational man’ (European) by castigating,

non-European cultures’ magic, witchcraft, pre-logical thought, superstitions or pseudosciences; with “folk explanations” or ethnosciences that are embedded in religious, anthropomorphic, and other only local belief systems; with merely technological achievements or merely speculative claims about the natural world; or with “precursors” to true sciences.248

She insists that efforts be made to study how ‘the epistemic status of sciences and technologies are always socially negotiated.’249 This will help cultivate an alternative ‘conceptual framework of postcolonial science and technology studies’ which is ‘organized from the standpoint of other, non-European cultures and the great masses of the world’s economically and politically most vulnerable people who live in them.’250 It will then be possible to ‘detect features of different cultures’ scientific and technological thought and practices that are not visible from within the familiar western accounts of science.’251 In other words, the effort here is to present an alternative account of ‘past, present, and future possibilities than were visible in the older, eurocentric “Tunnel of time” accounts of European and other scientific and technological traditions.’252