The two pillars of the DAE’s power, Ramana argues, are the promise or future projection of limitless energy, and the deadly attraction of the power to annihilate contained in nuclear weapons. The state seeks legitimacy through these two intimately connected parts of the nuclear programme. An elaborate charade rationalises its economic and political investment in nuclear power. Ramana shows how the DAE was crafted and run as an institution unanswerable to Parliament and the public. It abuses its power to mess up everything from uranium mining to spent-fuel reprocessing, violates its own safety norms, makes extravagant claims about developing technologies indigenously while importing/borrowing them, and hides major elements of generation costs through cheap accounting tricks.