A critical analysis of the technical facts can lead to no other conclusion. BARC must learn to tell the nation the truth.
Several inaccuracies in the claims made by BARC and in the articles published in the press, including The Hindu, on Pokhran-II need to be corrected. We have hard evidence on a purely factual basis, to inform the nation that not only was the yield of the second fusion (H-bomb) stage of the thermonuclear (TN) device tested in May 1998 was not only far below the design prediction made by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), but that it actually failed.
All the five nuclear tests conducted in May 1998 were undertaken through a joint BARC and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) team. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and R. Chidambaram assigned the DRDO team the critical responsibility for all the field instrumentation to record seismic data from all the tests: this was vital in estimating the yields. The seismic sensors were placed at many points in the device shafts and out to a radius of 2.5 km. The sensors and instrumentation were calibrated several hundred times and perfected. They fully met international standards and were acknowledged to be so by BARC.
The DRDO was thus deeply involved in all the seismic measurements and was fully aware of the BARC-projected readings vis-À-vis its own measurements. One of the authors, Dr. Santhanam, was personally aware in detail from key BARC scientists of the core designs and hence the projected yields. Consequently, the reference in a report published by The Hindu on August 28 (headlined “’Fizzle’ claim for thermonuclear test refuted”) attributed to a “former senior official of the Vajpayee government” that I was “not privy to the actual weapon designs which are highly classified,” was incorrect.
The DRDO also designed and conducted numerous tests of the High Explosive (HE) Trigger of the TN test. BARC scientists witnessed these tests, took copies of test records, and expressed satisfaction with the DRDO’s work.
Over May-October 1998, DRDO produced a comprehensive report of actual seismic readings vis-À-vis values predicted by BARC, mentioning why the former showed considerably lower yields than the latter.
The DRDO report was discussed at a meeting called by National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra in late 1998. The meeting was attended by Dr. Chidambaram and Dr. S.K. Sikka, the scientific head of the BARC team; Mr. Kalam, the Director-General of the DRDO; Dr. V.K. Aatre, the Chief Controller of the DRDO, Dr. Santhanam, and the Chiefs of the Defence Services. Despite a long discussion, largely between the DRDO and BARC, both stuck to their positions on the TN device yield. Thereafter, the NSA took a ‘voice vote’! This was highly unusual because the matter was technically very complex and the services were ill equipped to give an opinion on yields. Most surprisingly, NSA concluded saying government would stand by Dr. Chidambaram’s opinion.
Dr. Chidambaram’s claims and those in Atomic Energy Commission statement reported on September 16 under headline “No reason to doubt the yield of 1998 nuclear test: AEC” are wrong.
BARC basically argued that the geological structure of Pokhran was different from test sites elsewhere. However, the DRDO and BARC utilised the same published information in their calculations of TN device yield. BARC accepted the DRDO’s yield estimates of the fission (A) bomb, but not of the TN device, although the latter’s shaft was situated only a few hundred metres from the former’s shaft. Globally, geological structures do not change dramatically at such small separations. So BARC’s argument to “explain” a lower TN yield is untenable.
Dr. Chidambaram’s statement that “the post-shot radioactivity measurements on samples extracted from the test site showed significant activity [levels] of radioisotopes Sodium 22 and Manganese 54, both of which are byproducts of a fusion reaction rather than a pure fission [device]” is incorrect. He should indicate the exact level of activity instead of merely saying “significant activity” as the activity level determines whether a fusion reaction of the magnitude claimed by BARC actually occurred.
Dr. P.K. Iyengar, a former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a former Director of BARC, informed me that trace levels of these same isotopes were detected in Apsara, a pure fission reactor not involving any fusion at all. This is the exact opposite of Dr. Chidambaram’s claim.
Dr. Chidambaram’s statement that “from a study of this radioactivity and an estimate of the crater radius confirmed by drilling operations at positions away from the shaft, location, total yield and break-up of fission and fusion components, could be calculated” is extremely surprising. First, after the TN test, its shaft remained totally undamaged: if the fusion stage had worked, the shaft would have been totally destroyed. Secondly, the A-frame sitting astride the mouth of the shaft, with winches to lower and raise personnel, materials and so on, also remained completely intact. If the fusion stage had worked, the ‘A’ frame would also have been totally destroyed.
As for radioactivity levels, senior BARC radiochemists who undertook radio-assay of fission products in samples similarly drilled at Pokhran-I (of May 1974) told Santhanam that the yield announced to the media was substantially higher than what they had submitted to Dr. Raja Ramanna. Dr. Chidambaram must publicly substantiate any claim that it did not occur in the TN test along with justification data.
Dr. Chidambaram states: “BARC scientists worked out total yield of TN device as 50 +10 kt — consistent with design yield and seismic estimates.” However, he subsequently asserts: “BARC experts established DRDO had under-estimated yield due to faulty seismic instrumentation.” BARC cannot eat the cake and have it too.
The fission bomb yield from the DRDO’s seismic instrumentation was 25 +2 kiloton and left a crater 25 metres in diameter. If the TN device had really worked with a yield of 50 +2 kt, it should have left a crater almost 70 metres in diameter. Instead, all that happened was that sand and mud from the shaft were thrown several metres into the air and then fell back, forming a small depression in the shaft mouth. There was no crater.
This factual analysis reveals India’s decade-long, grim predicament regarding the failed TN bomb and so our Credible Minimum Deterrent (CMD). No country having undertaken only two weapon related tests of which the core TN device failed, can claim to have a CMD. This is corroborated by fact that even after 11 years the TN device has not been weaponised by BARC while the 25 kiloton fission device has been fully weaponised and operationally deployed on multiplate weapon platforms. It would be farcical to use a 3500-km range Agni-3 missile with a 25 kiloton fission warhead as the core of our CMD. Only a 150 – 350 kiloton if not megaton TN bomb can do so which we do not have.
(K. Santhanam was Project Leader, Pokhran-II. He worked as a physicist at BARC for 15 years. Later he was Chief Adviser (Technologies) in DRDO for 14 years and was then also Director General, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. Ashok Parthasarathi, the co-author of this article, was S&T Adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and deeply involved in Pokhran-I, of May.)
Keywords: Pokhran, 1998 nuclear test
Comments:
That various agencies of the Indian government hide crucial facts from its citizens is obvious. Why, only recently when ISRO was fully aware of the malfunctioning of Chandrayaan-I, it kept this information from the public for months. On another note, this controversy needs to be looked at from the point of view of the transparency, or lack thereof, of our government. Whether we have a credible deterrent is secondary; we need to go back to our insistence on a nuclear-weapons-free world.
Santhanam is correct in his analysis. However, he needs to apologize for being a party to this cover up operation for over a decade. The nation now knows that it does not have anything close to a minimum credible deterence. Those who have been lying for over a decade both inside and outside parliment need to be brought to book. At least on this critical issue, the policy must be decided in Delhi and not by Washington.
The armed forces need a light weight FBF warhead to be mounted on our missiles.The likely adversary targets are cities which have substantial infrastructure built up above ground.A 'Nagasaki/Hiroshima' type explosion would cause immense damage today.Both infrastructure and population obliteration caused by such a retaliatory strike in Pakistan / China is deemed unacceptable.The effect of this would be to remove the communist party from governance in China as the people would revolt.At present we need to concentrate on numbers of missiles in our arsenal spread over the length& breadth of our nation.This would ensure second strike capability.INS Arihant& her sister subs represent our best option after missile firing tests have been successfully carried out.The subs threaten the coastal cities of China/PAKISTAN from a range of around 1000kms.Both countries have nil capability at sea with respect to STRATEGIC ASW.This will ensure peace for 50 years& we can fine tune our strategic weapons during this phase.
Re: Viswanath
Santhanam has nothing to apologize for. Your response is the typical one indulged in by most victims where they pick on the one person willing to stand up and do the right thing. Santhanam voiced his opposition at the time of the tests and gave the benefit of the doubt to the BARC team to develop a solution and fix their mistake. With a decade gone and no solution in sight, and with the Govt ready to sign the CTBT under a flawed claim that India already has all the capability it requires, Santhanam was right to speak up and prevent a total failure of our strategic options. May India have many more people like Santhanam who have the spine to do the right thing.
If what Dr Santhanam says is correct- that India doesn't have CMD- then it is indeed a matter of deep concern. Few countries. certainly no major countries, have as unsettling and volatile neighbourhood than India. In the absence of CMD, India would be sitting duck to the China's ambitious strategic goals. Since India lacks wherewithal to face a conventional Chinese juggernaut, the absence of a CMD would encourage the Chinese to be more assertive and even adventurous in its dealing with India. Another humiliation at the hands of the Chinese would leave the Indian nation in virtual tatters. No nation with scars of humiliation and a resultant low-esteem can rise either economically or militarily to qualify even as a regional power, let alone superpower. In almost half a century since 1962 India has not been able to get its act together, to secure its border and provide a sense of security to its citizens. There can't be a more damning comment on India's political leadership than this.
The only way to avoid these kinds of situations spilling over in to the public domain is to institutionalise checks and balances. There absolutely MUST be another centre for nuclear weapon design in India besides BARC, with both centres equally resourced in terms of personnel and funding, and with access to the same data. That is the only way to provide secure, meaningful peer review on these complex, vital and sensitive questions until the much hoped for day of universal disarmament arrives. It is cheaper and safer than the alternative.
However until there is an Indian Lawrence Livermore to keep BARC (the Indian Los Alamos) on its toes, I for one am grateful that there are members of the technical national security establishment who have chosen to define national interest in terms of a credible, proven thermonuclear deterrent instead of a claims that mostly only convinced Indians. Deterrence must convince all challengers.
Mr K. Santhanam should first give a convincing reason as to why he kept quiet for more than a decade. There is no point in coming clean now,even if what he is claiming is true.His statements now can have only one impact-damage India's strategic interests.
Thank you to both Dr K. Santhanam and Ashok Parthasarathi for bringing out the facts into the open. I am really very angry at the government's and the Scientists involved in Pokhran II in playing games with the country's security. Lies and decet cannot and should not be the instruments of defence of our nation. Dr Chidambaram needs to explain to the nation about his false statements. We as taxpayers have the right to know the truth.
Amar Bhuyan
The government needs to come clean on the issue. Already the former army chief Gen.V.P. Malik has stated that the armed forces need to be reassured on the issue. The armed forces, the end users are called to act in case of a war situation. Hence the scientists need to come clean on the issue. If need be we should go ahead and test again. We should not care much about the Indo-US nuclear deal, as now our investment is minimum. Only our country's interest is the guiding principle. We should not forget that our neighbours have proven TN devices of yeilds upto 1 mega ton.
Unlike DRDO and ISRO which is open to intensive public and user scrutiny on their projects, BARC still remains an organisation who hides their extreme inefficient way of functioning under the garb of secrecy and press conferences tom tomming their non existent achievements, not visible to the public eye. This organisation needs a desperate and thorough overhaul. Dr Santhanam needs to be commended by a grateful nation on his risky exposure of this sinister organisation.
Deterrence should be all encompassing i.e., the whole world should believe that you posses it. Given the situation India should test 300 kiloton devices with all possible designs. This will not only assure the nation that we posses what we claim to posses. We should also design weapons based on thorium mixed with uranium or plutonium and these components can be used as a trigger for hydrogen bombs.
Dr. Santhanam, in the days immediately following the tests, is on record saying that the total yield of the simultaneous explosions S1 and S2 (fusion and fission, respectively) was limited by the need to avoid damage to the village of Khetolai, where residents could not even be evacuated because that would have given the secret away. As it happens, Khetolai suffered significant damage, with houses irreparably cracked and the water tank also cracked. It is a miracle that there was no serious venting from the shaft, unlike some American test disasters (12000 ft radioactive plume), or all the residents of Khetolai would have died a slow, painful death. So the debate now appears to be whether the yield was 50+10 KT or 27+33 KT. Per the above, Santhanam says the fission was 27KT, BARC claims it was only 10, and vice versa for the fusion.
While Mr K Santhanam may be correct in essential details, it cannot be ignored that he chose to remain quiet about the low yield of TN test for all these years...What prompted him to speak out now? Is it the CTBT issue? How many countries are serious about CTBT anyway? Further the tacit assumption that the measuring instruments worked perfectly to provide numbers to calculate the yield is not acceptable. With very little experience with such instrumentation, I am inclined to think that the instruments developed and used were either poorly designed or totally unreliable......There is greater chance that the instruements to measure the yield were duds and need to be examined.
People also need to understand that Thermonuclear [TN] test is not only required to develop a bigger [say 150 KT] bomb but also to reduce the size of existing bombs. With TN tech we can make say 50 KT bomb much smaller and lighter. This will allow our existing missiles to throw the bomb longer distance. Thereby lesser number of missiles->lesser logistics->lesser cost. We can also pack more MIRVs [or multipe warheads] in the same missile. In summary TN test is not only for just a BIG Bomb.
Even as a layman, I could get what Dr. Santhanam was trying to convey through this article. It's an acceptable analysis. Besides, it is difficult to buy the argument that Dr. Chidambaram proposed when he said,"BARC experts established DRDO had under-estimated yield due to faulty seismic instrumentation" considering the obvious fact that people at DRDO are domain-experts and the matter, due to its very nature, is not trivial enough to err in calculations of such critical significance. The point that the TN device has not been weaponized by BARC as yet further corroborates the case. However, the only question that tickles my mind is - Where was Dr. Santhanam all these years?
When someone speaks the truth, let's not ask the question why now and not before. The fact is that everything is not clean as was told to people from the time of nuclear test. Those responsible now, including NSA, should look into the whole subject and re-assure the nation. If needed, test should be repeated, even though it will have huge repercussions.
Dr. Santhanam considering the positions he had occupied and being brilliant as every one admits it, has revealed certain truths which could not have been done so earlier. Despite the delay in revelation Santhanam needs to be praised for warning the Nation at the crucial time.
Please read the article by K.Subramanyam and VS.Arunachalam in Hindu on the need for a a robust, mobile and credible deterrence instead of harping on kiloton yields. Both the authors present a logical argument for moving away from the Kiloton yield debate and concentrate on improving our delivery platforms. The policy makers first need to come out with a white paper on the threat perceptions we face and chalk out a second strike strategy that should employ both population/infrastructure annihilation and high magnitude impacts with thermonuclear devices. One suggestion would be to use highly robust and mobile delivery platforms for fission devices for our second strike and use thermonuclear fusion devices as a third strike option if the second strike does not produce the outcome we expected from our adversaries.
One note on this, I vaguely remember Lawrence Livermore Lab and Los Alamos center publishing a report that basically said our TN device was a failure, at that time the establishment and media discounted that report on nationalistic arguments and did not require our scientific establishment to rebut the report on technical basis. If we had done that at that time, the truth would have come out earlier.
This article has come up after so many years. What is the reason for the sudden revelation? He has brought a bad name to the hard work done by thousands of Indian scientists and has made India bow down its head in shame. I wonder whether the Official Secrecy Act has been breached.
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