INDIA RESUMES NUCLEAR TESTS, INFURIATES WORLD.

Byline: John F. Burns The New York Times

Nearly 24 years after it detonated its only nuclear explosion, India conducted three underground nuclear tests Monday at a site in its northwestern desert. The tests appeared to signal India's determination to abandon decades of ambiguity in favor of openly declaring that it has nuclear weapons.

After less than two months in office, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of a Hindu nationalist party that has advocated India's embracing nuclear weapons as a step toward great-power status, emerged on the lawn of his residence and read a statement. Speaking in the late afternoon, he said the tests had been carried out barely an hour earlier at the Pokharan testing range in Rajasthan state, 350 miles southwest of New Delhi, where India's first nuclear test was conducted May 18, 1974.

While popular opinion inside India appeared to be strongly behind the tests, as a demonstration of ability to compete scientifically and militarily with the most powerful nations, the outcry from outside India was almost universal.

Vajpayee spoke from a lectern placed beside a flagpole flying India's orange, white and green national flag.

``I have a brief announcement to make,'' he said. ``Today, at 15:45 hours, India conducted three underground nuclear tests in the Pokharan range. The tests conducted were with a fission device, a low-yield device, and a thermonuclear device.

``The measured yields are in line with expected values. Measurements have confirmed that there was no release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. These were contained explosions, like in the experiment conducted in May 1974.

``I warmly congratulate the scientists and engineers who have carried out the successful tests. Thank you very much indeed.''

Vajpayee's principal secretary, Brajesh Mishra, later said the tests showed ``that India has a proven capability for a weaponized nuclear program.'' Indian experts said the explosions tested different types of nuclear warheads for India's fast-developing missile program, which has a mix of delivery vehicles designed to reach targets as close as Pakistan and as distant as China. Mishra said the tests would help scientists design ``nuclear weapons of different yields for different applications and for different delivery systems.''

The tests were widely welcomed in India, with hardly any immediate dissent from opposition political parties and no sign of the Gandhian pacifism that was a strong element in Indian policy in the early years of the country's independence from Great Britain, gained in 1947.

Even Vajpayee's predecessor as prime minister, I.K. Gujral, a political moderate who blocked the tests during his year in office, said: ``It was always known that India had the capability to do this. The tests only confirm what was always known.''

But dozens of governments expressed anger that India had broken an informal moratorium on nuclear testing that went into effect after scores of nations met at the United Nations in the autumn of 1996 to endorse a measure known as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban all nuclear tests, in the atmosphere and underground. India and Pakistan stood aside from the treaty, widely regarded as a key step toward halting the spread of nuclear weapons.

The Indian tests drew immediate condemnation from the Clinton administration, which issued a statement that the United States was ``deeply disappointed'' and was reviewing trade and financial sanctions against India under American nonproliferation laws. A British statement expressed dismay. Germany labeled the tests ``a slap in the face'' for 149 countries that have signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, said he felt ``deep regret.''

Perhaps the most significant reaction came from Pakistan, where the foreign minister raised fears that years of effort by the United States to prevent an unrestrained nuclear arms race on the Indian subcontinent were on the verge of collapse. Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub Khan, speaking in the absence of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was visiting Central Asia, hinted that Pakistan would consider conducting a nuclear test of its own - its first.

Pakistan, which has had its own covert nuclear-weapons program since the early 1970s, ``reserves the right to take all appropriate measures for its security,'' Ayub Khan told Pakistan's Senate in Islamabad, the capital.

Amid an outpouring of demands from right-wing politicians and hard-line Islamic groups for an immediate nuclear test by Pakistan, Ayub Khan added: ``The responsibility for dealing a death blow to the global efforts at nonproliferation rests squarely with India.''

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