DUD BOMB WAS MADE A SUCCESS BY GOVT DIKTAT.

DRDO, R& AW reports saying H- Bomb was afizzle were disregarded

THE GOVERNMENT is choosing to ignore evidence that India's 1998 hydrogen bomb test at Pokhran was a failure.

It has disregarded the report of the Defence Research and Development Organisation ( DRDO) team led by scientist K. Santhanam that carried out the test which had said it was effectively a fizzle.

Also, little attention has been paid to the detailed information provided by a supersecret facility of the Aviation Research Centre ( ARC) -- the technical wing of India's external intelligence agency, the Research & Analysis Wing ( R& AW) -- which had endorsed the recording of the test by DRDO. Santhanam had recently said that the 1998 hydrogen bomb test was a " fizzle". He has now made another sensational disclosure -- that Pokhran- II was declared a success by a " political fatwa" of the NDA government ignoring technical data to the contrary.

There might be no ' fatwa' this time, but there is the same disregard for the facts pertaining to the 1998 test. The government approach seems to be more in keeping with political expediency than a desire to find out what really happened.

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On Tuesday, the Atomic Energy Commission ( AEC) upheld the figure of 45 kiloton yield for the hydrogen bomb test of May 11, 1998. But, the Karnal seismic array maintained by the ARC had come up with a figure of just 20- 25 kiloton yield. This was in consonance with the figures that the DRDO instruments had recorded.

The facility at Karnal in Haryana, which was specifically set up in association with the US's National Security Agency ( NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) in the wake of the first Chinese nuclear test in October 1964, has ultra- sophisticated instrumentation obtained from the US. " These are more sophisticated than anything that the Department of Atomic Energy ( DAE) has," said a source. They are designed to track underground nuclear weapon tests and have their instruments in a deep vertical shaft dug deep into the ground, in contrast to the system mounted on the surface at the DAE facility at Gauribidanur in Karnataka.

The R& AW collated all its findings and after analysing them, sent them on to the government, presumably the Prime Minister's Office ( PMO)-- Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the PM then. These findings, which were in agreement with those of the instruments set up by the DRDO on the test site, created consternation within the government.

Meetings were held to reconcile the reports it had received from the DRDO, the DAE and the ARC. Finally, the then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra convened a meeting of the DAE and DRDO representatives along with the three armed forces chiefs sometime in October 1998.

Since the two scientific organisations stuck to their positions, Mishra took a " voice vote" which decided that the DRDO was wrong and the DAE was right. An official familiar with the meeting noted that the

ARC representative was not invited for the meeting. " The decision to declare the hydrogen bomb a success was more of a political fatwa than a considered scientifictechnical determination," says Santhanam.

The NDA government's response was an outcome of two interconnected factors.

First, the admission of failure would have been politically damaging. Second, the tests had enraged the US and New Delhi was simply not willing to prolong the process and it quickly declared a unilateral moratorium on further testing.

Santhanam has since spelt out the reasons why he made his claim that the test was a fizzle. He has pointed out that the key instrumentation -- those for measuring acceleration and the ground movement-- were all put in place by the DRDO. " They were in the shaft and radiating outward from the location of the device to the bunkers where the recording instruments were some 2- 3 km away," he said.

He said these had been calibrated " several hundred times" and had little room for malfunction.

The readings of the instruments

were then factored into mathematical equations that provided estimates of the yield.

He has also pointed to the fact that the shaft with the hydrogen bomb device had remained intact, in contrast to the fission bomb, one which had produced a crater some 35m wide.

While the DAE has claimed that the DRDO's seismic systems had malfunctioned, they have not yet responded to the fact that there was another, more sophisticated test, called the CORRTEX test which also confirmed the DRDO finding. The CORRTEX estimates the size of the explosion by measuring the time it takes to crush a cable inserted into the test shaft.

In the case of the Pokhran tests, the Terminal Ballistics Laboratory, Chandigarh, had a more sophisticated and sensitive system using a fibre- optic cable which gave an estimate of the yield in terms of the time the shock wave takes for the light to be extinguished in the cable.

The ARC is now part of the National Technical Research Office and the scientist who carried out the analysis is still in service with the outfit. Another source has pointed out, that the same facility had given a yield for the 1974 test as being below the one claimed.

The history of American technical involvement in monitoring Chinese weapons of mass destruction activity is well- known because of the infamous Nanda Devi episode. A nuclearpowered communications intelligence device was emplaced high up on the mountain in the Uttarakhand Himalayas.

It later vanished, provoking fears of nuclear contamination of the rivers of the Ganga system.

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