Mahatma Gandhi maintain for years that Jawaharlal Nehru would be his successor and the first ruler of the unified India he was striving for. Although Gandhi got to see precious little of his dream, Nehru did indeed take over, facing a political climate that was if anything even more daunting than of Gandhi’s time. India was now facing a hostile Muslim-majority nation at its border and a broader cold war game played by the superpowers that threatened to make his country a pawn. Nehru urged both sides to come to reason.

On this day, November 27, in 1957, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made a public speech in Delhi calling in the U.S. and the Soviet Union to suspend the nuclear arms race.

Predictably, his appeal fell on deaf ears. Nehru concluded the only way to achieve parity with the nuclear powers was to develop nuclear weapons himself. Nehru formed an Indian Atomic Energy Commission, headed by Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, whose studied in the same circles as the scientists of the Manhattan Project. Bhabha’s research and leadership brought India their own nuclear weapons by 1974.