It began with a label on one of our nuclear heritage artifacts, a traditional Gurkha kukri knife, in the Society for the Preservation of Canada’s Nuclear Heritage (SPCNHI, aka “Spinach”) collection. The knife was presented to Al Herriot by his Indian students at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratory; the students were studying the NRX reactor in preparation for operating their own reactor, the “Canada-India Reactor Utility Services” (CIRUS) near Mumbai. It was designed and built by AECL, first becoming critical (operational) on July 10 1960.
Being a self-appointed expert of Canadian nuclear history, I knew that CIRUS stood for “Canada-India Reactor, United States”. The research reactor was essentially a copy of NRX, initially called CIR, but “US” was later added since the United States provided the heavy water. I pointed out the erroneous explanation to the tireless Jim Ungrin, our artifacts chief and author of the labels. Jim had found the CIRUS acronym explained on Wikipedia, a reasonably reliable source, which mentions how a later desalination unit used waste heat from the reactor.
Hmm, not so simple, me lad! Further searching revealed that Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, first chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, named the reactor CIRUS in honour of Cyrus the Great, the Zoroastrian founder of the Achaemenid dynasty in Persia (Iran) in the 6th century B.C. This claim was further spread by Dr. Homi Sethna, the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission who was also the CIRUS project manager. Cyrus was a wise and generous ruler – the Bible tells the story of Cyrus’ liberation of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and subsequent resettlement and rebuilding Jerusalem, earning him an honoured place in Judaism.
The February 1967 edition of AECL Review, in our Society’s archives, stated that the Trombay Nuclear Centre was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in honour of the late Dr. Bhabha. The article confirmed that CIR was renamed CIRUS by Dr. Bhabha, phonetically perpetuating the name of Cyrus the Great. My friend and fellow director Sourena Golesorkhi, originally from Iran, was surprised the reactor was named after a Persian king. On further investigation, we learned that Bhabha and Sethna were both Parsis – members of a small Zoroastrian community, descendants of Persians who had migrated to India with the advent of Islam. Perhaps CIRUS was indeed named after Cyrus.
So why did I think the “US” referred to our southern neighbour? CIRUS was part of the Colombo Plan, an intergovernmental organization that began in 1951 for the development of human resources in southern Asia. It seems peculiar that the USA support to CIRUS was not proclaimed – after all, the United States supplied the heavy water, because Canada produced none at the time.
The dark side of the CIRUS story now must be told. Despite Canadian and US stipulations that the reactor was only for peaceful purposes, CIRUS predated the United Nations “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)”, adopted in 1968. Canada was an early NPT signatory but, sadly, India has refused to do so. On May 18 1974, India exploded its first nuclear weapon under Homi Sethna’s supervision, ostensibly for peaceful purposes, in the cynically-named “Operation Smiling Buddha”. The detonation shocked the world, in particular Canada and AECL, upon which the blame fell since the plutonium undoubtedly originated with irradiated CIRUS fuel. Canada, after unsuccessfully trying to establish a nuclear non-proliferation agreement, cut off any further nuclear cooperation with India in May 1976; this lasted until 2015, when a new Nuclear Cooperation Agreement came into effect.
A 2005 article in from the Nuclear Control Institute, “CIRUS Reactor’s Role in a U.S.-India Nuclear Agreement”, offers an interesting perspective on the lack of “United States” in the CIRUS acronym. According to author Paul Leventhal, the US supply of heavy water for CIRUS was covered up by the US government: “a Congressional liaison officer of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission said he was calling to inform me that India had just conducted a nuclear test and to assure me that the United States had absolutely nothing to do with it. … It took me two years to discover that the information provided me that day was false. The United States, in fact, had supplied the essential heavy-water component that made the CIRUS reactor operable, but decided to cover up the American supplier role and let Canada “take the fall” for the Indian test. Canada promptly cut off nuclear exports to India, but the United States did not.”
So, what’s in the name CIRUS? Was it simply an extension to the original “Canada-India Reactor” to honour King Cyrus the Great, or was it Homi Bhabha’s acknowledgement of US involvement in the reactor? We may never know for sure. All I know for certain is that my self-assured knowledge of Canadian nuclear history is not so firm.
Oh, and one more thing for those who believe in conspiracies; Bhabha died when Air India Flight 101 crashed near Mont Blanc in the Alps on 24 January 1966. Apparently former CIA operative Robert Crowley, once second in command of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, implied the CIA was responsible for assassinating Bhabha. But that’s another story.
