M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India —
At precisely the moment that U.S. President Barack Obama is returning to the
road travelled by Bill Clinton – trying to "persuade" India that
nuclear weapons would make the country less, rather than more, secure – top
scientists within the country have stated publicly that India’s 1998 nuclear
test was a dud, and that the declared yields were false.
The assertion is
not surprising – it dates back to the day of the test – but what is surprising
is that this important question remains unresolved 11 years after the event.
The majority
view among India's nuclear scientists has always been that the 1998 nuclear
test was unsuccessful. Only a single scientist and his superiors in the Prime
Minister's Office believed then – and still do – that it was a "great
success." Understandably, the Manmohan Singh government is reluctant to
conduct a serious peer review, preferring instead to rely on the opinions of a
few in-house scientists on a matter critical to national security.
The
"success camp," led by that determined scientist, R. Chidambaram,
insists that the “yield” – or destructive capacity – was satisfactory. It
relies on statements published in journals by the Bhabha Atomic Research
Center, which made the bomb, to prove its point.
Its primary
source is the internal BARC newsletter, which has no peer review process, is
circulated only within the BARC/Department of Atomic Energy family, and has
been known to publish practically anything that carries any senior BARC
functionary’s name on it. In the case of the 1998 explosion results, the
"proof" is the printed view of Chidambaram himself, as then director
of BARC.
