Games India’s bomb makers played in Pokhran

By Manish Chand

Ten years ago, India's bomb makers played a little game of deception in the scorching deserts of Pokhran in Rajasthan. 'Colonel Prithviraj,' called K. Santhanam, the director of the test site for India's second nuclear test and a pointsman for weaponisation prgoramme. His voice quivered in the desert air.

He was addressing A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. But all he could get from the missile man, who was later to become the president of India, was a blank stare.

Similarly, R. Chidambaram, then head of the Atomic Energy Commission, looked the other way when Santhanam addressed him as 'Col. Natraj'. Santhanam was known in the desert as 'Col. Srinivisan'.

Dressed in battle fatigues, these were no battle-hardened soldiers, but the prized quartet of India's top scientists - Chidambaram, Kalam, Santhanam and Anil Kakodkar, then head of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. They had been entrusted by prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee with the top secret job of detonating a bomb and making India a nuclear power.

'It was difficult in the beginning to recognise our code names which we had given to ourselves in the course of Operation Shakti (codename for the nuclear test),' recalls Santhanam, then chief adviser (technology) to the government of India.

'Anil Kakodkar was called Mamaji. We adopted these code names so that we didn't arouse suspicion of local people and of countries who may be spying on us,' says Santhanam, who thought of this brilliant subterfuge.

'Naturally, there was a lot of confusion initially. If Kalam were to call me 'Col. Srinivisan', I would not know he was addressing me. Or when I will call him 'Col. Privthiraj', he would look blank, wondering who I was calling.

'But soon we got used to it,' the 70-year-old Santhanam recalled with relish.

The deception and camouflage was not confined to just adopting code names for the one-month secret mission that culminated in the dramatic emergence of India as a nuclear weapon state after three blasts May 11 and two more blasts May 13.

The moment Vajpayee gave the green signal around April 10, the quartet, along with 100-120 scientists and nearly 1,000 sappers of the Corps of Engineers, headed to the Pokhran range to engineer the blasts that were to shock the world.

They were all dressed in olive green fatigues.

Pokhran was where India carried out its first nuclear tests in 1974. In 1995, an Indian attempt to test a nuclear device had to be scrapped after American satellites got the whiff of it.

No one was taking any chance this time.

'The logic was simple: as the Pokhran range was swarming with army personnel, we decided to dress in battle fatigues so as not to raise unnecessary eyebrows,' said Santhanam.

'Since it was a border area, there was a high likelihood of informers in the place. Scientists in trousers would have attracted unwanted attention. Some scientists were also potbellied. The locals would not have thought them to be soldiers, who are a fit and sprightly lot.'

All this was done to avoid the stealthy gaze of spy satellites, particularly the American ones. 'Compared to the 1974 tests, we were more knowledgeable about surveillance systems,' he explained.

'That's why we avoided any movement during the satellite hours. We normally worked at night and carried on till the small hours without any sleep. Chances of detection in the night are zero and the quality of satellite images is very bad.'

One month of tiring, sleepless nights paid off in the late afternoon of May 11.

'The earth trembled a little. As the blasts were in a shaft deep down, we couldn't feel much. I called it a bum tickle.'

The bum tickle was followed by a spontaneous eruption of joy among scientists after the tests were confirmed.

'We hugged each other. The team as a whole had a feeling of self-fulfilment, a feeling of having contributed to national security,' said Santhanam. 'There was a sense of collective jubilation rather than individual triumphalism.

'When we called Vajpayee (in Delhi), he was absolutely delighted. He was happy and complimented the team.'

Kalam took off his Gorkha cap and his silvery mane fluttered in the desert air, signaling the end of disguise and India’s outing as a nuclear weapon state.

From Pokhran-II to India-US nuclear deal

'I have an announcement to make: today at 3.45 p.m. India conducted three underground nuclear tests at the Pokhran range,' said Atal Bihari Vajpayee in his soft undertone on the sleepy afternoon of May 11, 1998.

The revelation literally dropped like a bomb on the journalists who had turned up in large number on the lawns of the Indian prime minister's official residence at 7, Race Course Road.

It was a terse statement that announced India's arrival at the elite nuclear club but sent shockwaves through the world capitals.

In India, the tests triggered waves of jubilation among the' masses and classes' alike which saw them as a passport to global prestige and clout.

But there were also the party-poopers. Many of them saw the tests as the beginning of India's isolation and collapse of the country's economy in the face of retaliatory sanctions that were bound to come from the major international players. The national mood, however, remained upbeat on the whole.

The BJP, which shrewdly tapped into the psychology of the masses, managed to push its popularity sky-high. The Bombay Stock Exchange sensex, a barometer of the mood swings of the country's moneyed classes, chimed in approvingly.

Patriotism suddenly became fashionable and India's newly acquired nuclear weapons, turned into prized vehicles of national pride.

'It was a sense of relief and freedom,' says Jaswant Singh, the former external affairs minister and senior BJP leader. Singh, a close aide of Vajpayee recalling the historic day that saw India's dramatic emergence as a nuclear weapon state after at least two failed attempts said, 'I told myself, Thank God, we don't have to live in the taikhana (basement) any more.'

This sense of nationalist euphoria was predictably not shared by a shocked international community. It saw the tests as a brazen attempt by India, a non-signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to gate-crash into the exclusive club jealously guarded by the five permanent nuclear weapon states of the UN Security Council.

The US, which prided itself of knowing secrets of other countries, was scandalized at India's act of defiance. The BJP-led NDA had assured Washington many times that it had no intention of testing a nuclear device, though it continued to say so in its party manifesto.

The American government was seething with anger for having fallen for BJP's ambivalence. 'Nobody expected the Vajpayee government to test within days of coming to power in 1998,' says K. Subrahmanyam, an eminent strategic expert who has advised successive governments.

The Americans had tried hard to break through the BJP's web of secrecy. But it was a knowledge that was closely guarded by Vajpayee, the home minister L.K.Advani, National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra and Jaswant Singh. The defence minister George Fernandes was told about the government's intentions only 48 hours before the tests.

To avoid a repeat of the aborted tests in 1995 under American pressure, top Indian scientists entrusted with engineering the tests played an elaborate game of camouflage by donning green battle fatigues and calling themselves by their code-names to deceive American spy satellites.

But after soaking in this triumph, sobering realities dawned. Realists, who knew the sanctions can't be far away after the tests, spoke about the tough challenge that India was about to face. Others spoke ominously about a renewed arms race in South Asia, as Pakistan was bound to follow what India had done.

The sanctions from the US and most of its allied countries had come almost immediately. The five declared nuclear powers, that included the US, United Kingdom, France, Russia and China, were stunned by India's action. The response of the French and the Russians was a little subdued. But they were unable to prevent the UN Security

Council from demanding that India dismantle its nuclear and missile programmes immediately and sign the NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) without further delay.

Other nations followed with punitive action. Australia and the UK had their high commissioners recalled for 'consultation' to keep up the pressure against India. Japan, the only country in the world to have been attacked by an atomic bomb, cancelled most of its aid to India.

Various technology denial regimes like the Missile Technology Control Regime were strengthened to starve India of cutting-edge dual-use technologies.

In a letter to then US president Bill Clinton, Vajpayee had cited the China threat as the chief incitement for India's nuclear tests. China, which was described by Fernandes the 'threat number one' to the Indian security and, therefore, one of the main reasons for India to explode its nuclear veil, had taken the lead to isolate India at every available forum.

The pressure mounted further when Pakistan conducted six nuclear tests of its own towards the end of May 1998, fuelling anxieties about South Asia turning into a potential nuclear flashpoint.

But India had proved a point with the nuclear tests that it was no longer ready to sit on the margins of the nuclear pecking order. The sanctions stayed in place, but the world's leading powers were forced to change the terms of engagement with India.

The US, the world's only superpower, started a process of rapprochement with the visit of President Bill Clinton to India in 2000 which some experts have described as a 'turning point' in the India-US relations.

With the US showing the way, other influential countries that led the sanctions charge against India also softened their attitude. Over the years, China, Japan and other richest countries of the G-8 have forged strategic partnerships with India.

Ten years after the May 1998 nuclear tests, India, which was once sought to be isolated, is now being hailed as a rising power. It has become 'one of the fastest growing economies in the world' and every country is keen to do business with India.

The 'nuclear apartheid' that India had challenged, still remains. But many in the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers' Group are keen to support the civil nuclear deal that India wants to sign with the US. If it comes through, it will start cooperation between India and the world on civil nuclear energy. It will also give access to India to dual-use and other sophisticated technologies that were so far denied to it for nearly three decades.

But even though India is close to entering the global nuclear mainstream, detractors still remain sceptical about the status of New Delhi's nuclear deterrence capability.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has assured many a time the Indo-US deal will not compromise India's nuclear deterrence capability that was earned through the Pokhran II tests. If India can join the global nuclear order by retaining its 'credible minimum deterrence,' the May 1998 tests would have served its purpose.

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