India, April 12 -- At the first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva in August 1955, Homi Jehangir Bhabha made a wager on behalf of a country that had been independent for eight years and poor for considerably longer. He argued that India should not be chasing uranium, a resource which India imported. What it possessed, in the monazite-rich beach sands of Kerala, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh, was thorium. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of all the thorium in the world. The path forward was a three-stage nuclear programme, each stage feeding the next, terminating in a closed thorium fuel cycle that could power India for centuries. Bhabha died in January 1966, when Air India Flight 101 struck...