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Wednesday's tests are of weapons of war

P Rajendran in Bombay

Why did India have to conduct two more tests, two days after needling the world with one set?

According to Dr M R Srinivasan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, even conducting three tests together was unusual; most nations conducted one at a time. It would also call for far more work.

"The tests seem to be of the sub-kiloton range -- less than the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT -- and fall in the category of practical or theatre nuclear weapons -- used in the theatre of war. They have tested the whole range."

Dr P K Iyengar, also a former AEC chairman, told Rediff On The NeT that India was checking all varieties of nuclear weapons, from the sub-kiloton devices tested on Wednesday afternoon to the 50 kiloton device on Monday. This, he said, would convince the world about India's nuclear capability.

Asked if computer simulations would not provide as good data, Dr Iyengar said computer results would have to be verified and that was just what was done during these tests. Once the calculations depending on various yields had been verified, India could build more weapons, maybe even for stockpiling, he said.

"Nowadays a lot of performance information can be forecast on the computer," Dr Srinivasan said. But after simulation, actual tests were necessary to validate the project.

Work has been going on in this field though actual tests had not been conducted.

"The world has not done a great deal of denuclearisation... India was made to suffer due to its restraint," he said.

Dr Vijay P Bhatkar, director of the Centre for Advanced Computing, Pune, and the architect of India's grand supercomputing programme, told Rediff On The NeT that simulating nuclear explosions was never his brief, nor has C-DAC done any nuclear simulation work.

Dr Bhatkar said he was not aware of the second set of nuclear tests today, adding that he was not expected to process the data emerging from them.

The latest of the series of high-performance number-crunchers that his team has built -- the Param -- he said, has been sold to only one government agency, the National Informatics Centre.

Sources at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre -- India's premier nuclear outfit -- said only economic sanctions would matter, scientific and technological sanctions were nothing new. Soon after India refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, many nations refused India equipment without businessmen from their country first finding out for what it was being used.

Even earlier, after the May 1974 test, when Canada stopped supplying nuclear fuel to the atomic plant at Tarapur near Bombay, one BARC source said, India's nuclear programme had been put back by 15 years.

According to the sources, there was already evidence that something was afoot, since 10 days ago AEC chairman R Chidambaram, BARC director Anil Kakodkar, S S Kapoor, the physics group director, Deen Dayal Sood, the radioisotopes group director, all left, allegedly for various locations. A sure sign that something big was to happen. As it did.

Additional reportage: Zaki Ansari

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