Saturday, 10 May 2008

Pokhran-II

Ten years ago today, India decided to take the step into the nuclear weapons club. It had already detonated a 'peaceful' nuclear device 24 years earlier, in 1974, but had refrained from making its weaponization efforts overt.

If India thought that labeling the test 'peaceful' would somehow stop Pakistan from responding, it was very wrong. The 1974 test signaled the start of a febrile arms race in South Asia. A young AQ Khan brought European centrifuge technology to Pakistan, and set up his own shop close to Rawalpindi, see my post here. By the mid 1980s, Pakistan had amassed enough nuclear material for its first atomic bomb.

For more than a decade, the two states had nervously held back on making their capabilities known. Most of this time, this was due to external pressure, foremost from the United States. Both India and Pakistan knew that setting of a nuclear device would impact on their relations with the US, but they also knew that relations would settle down to normal relatively quickly.

By 1996, there was a new political power rising in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Atal Behari Vajpayee, ran on an nationalist platform and had a strong defence agenda. Indeed, the nationalist government had already ordered a test in 1996. The device had been lowered into the zero room and were ready to be fired by the time Vajpayees short lived (13 day) government had dissolved. When Vajpayee lost power, the device was lifted out of the shaft and site operations returned to normal maintenance.

The 1996 preparations were on a massive scale, and prompted the writing of Vipin Gupta and Frank Pabian's legendary paper entitled 'Investigating the Allegations of Indian Nuclear Test Preparations in the Rajasthan Desert'.

It would take two more years, however, before the BJP dream could come through. This time, the Indian military would make an effort to hide its test preparations to the largest degree possible. India's final preparations were done at hours when there was no satellite reconnaissance coverage of the site. They made sure that heavy equipment was returned to the exact same parking spot at the time of the next overpass, making scene change recognition difficult. When they rolled out their diagnostic cables, they made sure that they were covered by sand. They even replaced removed vegetation in order to conceal the dig.

Some of these precautions are visible today. For instance, it is very difficult to identify the old cable layout running from the Control Bunker to the drill-holes from available Google Earth Imagery, see my GE placemark of the site.


The week of the test
On 1 May 1998, a four truck convoy under the command of Colonel Umang Kapur left BARC for Mumbai Airport. The devices were then flown in AN-32 aircraft 890 kilometers to the North, to Jaisalmer Airport where they were again loaded into four trucks. The remaining 80 kilometers were travelled by road.

At Pokhran, the devices were taken directly to the preparation building (code named 'Prayer Hall') where scientists and technicians carried out final tests to ensure that the weapons were ready to detonate. Nine days later, on 10 May 1998, the first three devices were moved from Prayer Hall to their respective test shafts. All three shafts where L-shaped, and about 150 to 200 meters deep. The Shakti-III shaft was considerably shallower (since the weapon was of a smaller yield).

Cables had been laid out so that all three weapons would be detonated simultaneously. This had been common practice in the nuclear weapon States during the Cold War, so that the competition would not pick up valuable telemetric data from the test.

All work was carried out during the night. When the sun rose, and temperatures climbed over 30 and then 40 degrees centigrade, everything was in order. It must have been a hot, nervous and sweaty wait for the Indians on site. Abdul Kalam, the scientific advisor to the Indian defence minister must have smoked at least a pack before wind conditions became suitable for the shot.

At 14:45, the firing keys were given to the range safety officer. At that point, the temperature had reached 42 degrees centigrade. It must have been very hot in the control bunker, located about 2.75 kilometers from the three zero rooms. After final safety checks, and confirmation that the range was clear, the keys were transferred to one representative of BARC and one from the DRDO. Together they unlocked the countdown system. At that point, history became a matter of automation, and at 15:45 local time the three devices exploded, effectively opening a new chapter in India's long history.

I've uploaded an annotated GE placemark of the site here.

The Nuclear Weapons Archive has published a list of all principals involved in the test.

Project Leaders:
Development and Test Teams:
  • Anil Kakodkar, Director of BARC
  • Satinder Kumar Sikka, Lead for Thermonuclear Weapon Development
  • M.S. Ramakumar, Director of Nuclear Fuel and Automation Manufacturing Group; Lead for nuclear component manufacture
  • D.D. Sood, Director of Radiochemistry and Isotope Group; Lead for nuclear material acquisition
  • S.K. Gupta, Solid State Physics and Spectroscopy Group; Device design and assessment
  • G. Govindraj, Associate Director of Electronic and Instrumentation Group; Lead for field instrumentation
  • K. Santhanam; lead for test site preparations
  • Chairman of the Department of Atomic energy (DAE)
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