Fear of nuclear war with the US drove Nehru’s Afro-Asian bloc

Evidence

A key element in this emphasis on the military aspect was that the Korean War which had just ended had cost a million Chinese deaths, the Soviet Union had developed irs atomic and hydrogen bombs, and there was a powerful argument in the United States, gripped at the time by Dulles-style hysterical anti-communism, to annihilate the Soviet Union before it became a full-scale nuclear power; similar scenarios for the annihilation of … China had been put forward all through the Korean War. Those urgent matters were part of that political moment in which Nehru, certainly, visualized a bloc of Afro-Asian countries interposing themselves between the United Stares and the Soviet Union. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1269

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Decoding who utters Nehru’s ‘we’ dissolves the image of a unified Third World bloc — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1277; Indian socialists’ 1948 exit from Congress foreclosed their return and shaped Nehru’s left turn — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 573

Broader Connections

• Decoding who utters Nehru’s ‘we’ dissolves the image of a unified Third World bloc #complicates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1277
• Indian socialists’ 1948 exit from Congress foreclosed their return and shaped Nehru’s left turn #expands (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 573