There is so much confusion about the Pokhran duds that defense analysts cannot make head or tail about the claims and counter-claims. This much is certain. The Bharati tests were a fizzle and this places their entire “nuclear’ program under a shadow of doubt. because the bombs are untested, the bombs on top of the missiles are also duds. The fact that the Agni, Nag, Trishul and Brahmos missiles are duds anyway is besides the point. Even if Bharat had good missiles, the firecrackers on top of them would simply fizzle without an explosion. The Times of India report and the articles by the lead Indian scientists like K Santhanam make it crystal clear that the Slumdog powers slumdog bombs don’t work.
NEW DELHI: Undeterred by the manner in which government agencies came down on him for his remarks on Pokhran-II, former DRDO scientist and project director for India’s 1998 nuclear tests K Santhanam has accused former NSA Brajesh Mishra of trivialising the hydrogen bomb test result by declaring it successful on the basis of a voice vote which comprised officials like defence service chiefs who had no understanding of the technical aspects of the test.
Santhanam was the first official involved in Pokhran-II to have described the hydrogen bomb test as a failure and on Thursday he carried his argument further by stating that there were serious differences between the yields for the thermonuclear (TN) test as measured by BARC and as measured by DRDO.
Santhanam said that there was a meeting convened by Mishra after the tests to sort out these differences and that this is where he called for a voice vote to break the deadlock. Apart from several scientists like AEC chairman R Chidambaram, BARC director Anil Kakodkar and scientific advisor to defence ministry APJ Abdul Kalam, all defence chiefs were also present in the meeting. Santhanam suggested that the voice vote went in favour of Chidambaram and Kalam because those who had no knowledge about the TN test went along with the government line. In any case, said Santhanam, Mishra concluded by stating that he would go by what Chidambaram had to say.
When contacted by TOI, Mishra vehemently denied that there was any such voice vote. “There was a meeting held in the PMO but there was no such voice vote. Santhanam of course expressed some reservations in the meeting about the test result and there were differences between him and Kalam. However, Kalam was his boss and he laid all doubts to rest in an interview to a government news agency on September 22, 1998, that the test was successful with a 45 KT yield,” said Mishra.
“I don’t know why Santhanam is making such statements. The AEC scientists explained all aspects of the test in the meeting and the matter should have ended,” he added.
In his column in a daily, Santhanam also rubbished Chidambaram’s claim that he did not have any information about the weapon design saying that DRDO was involved in all seismic measurements and it was also aware of the BARC readings. He said that DRDO was assigned the responsibility of instrumentation and that its seismic sensors were of international standards.
Santhanam emphasised that if the TN test had really been successful with a yield of 50 KT, it would have left a crater at least 70 metres in diameter because the fission bomb test with only a 25 KT yield had left a 25-metre diameter crater. The hydrogen bomb test instead left just a minor depression and no crater. ‘NSA trivialized nuke test result’ TNN 18 September 2009, 04:10am IST. Times of India report.
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