Bharat Karnad: India geostrategy, nuclear arsenal, and assassination of Homi Bhabha, the Oppenheimer of India — #46

Bharat Karnad is an Emeritus Professor in National Security Studies at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi. He was a member of India's first National Security Advisory Board and has authored several books on nuclear weapons and Indian security.Karnad's blog: https://bharatkarnad.com/Karnad on the death of Homi Bhabha and of other atomic weapons scientists:https://bharatkarnad.com/2020/12/06/kill-scientists-disrupt-n-weapons-programmes/An excellent documentary film on the life of Indian theoretical physicist Homi Bhabha:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6GEGOvXh4g&ab_channel=InternationalCentreforTheoreticalSciencesSteve and Bharat discuss:0:00 Introduction0:58 Karnad's educational background, nuclear research, journalism career26:50 Refocusing India's defense posture from Pakistan to China45:21 Why don't India and China have better relations?53:33 India's nuclear arsenal1:04:31 The mysterious death of Homi Bhabha, India's Oppenheimer1:28:50 Land of subjugation, the caste system, and English as the language of Indian elitesMusic used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.--Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.