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Pak tests inconsequential, suggest experts

C K Arora in Washington

The global network that tracks earthquakes and underground atomic blasts found only a faint echo from Pakistan's second nuclear test, on May 30, which could mean the test was successful but small, or that the test was a failure and produced relatively few shock waves, says the New York Times, quoting US experts.

''It's small event,'' said Terry Wallace, a seismologist at the University of Arizona, who works with the Incoporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a scientific group in Washington.

Wallace said the blast had a preliminary magnitude of 4.3 Richter, equal to about 1,000 tons of high explosive. By contrast, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had an explosive force of 15,000 tons.

The main Pakistan blasts on Thursday was monitored as having a magnitude of 4.8 Richter, equal to 8,000 to 15,000 tons. Such bombs are considered relatively small by the standards of world arsenals, where the explosive power of warheads can exceed millions of tonnes.

Saturday's blast was too small to show up on the US government's main network for monitoring earthquakes around the world. ''We have searched everything we have and we don't see anything,'' said Waverly Pearson, a spokesman at the National Earthquake Information Centre in Golden, Colorado. ''We didn't record anything at all.''

Both groups of scientsts said they would continue to examine data as it came in and held out the possibility that more faint signals from the Pakistan test site might be uncovered.

The daily quoted an arms-control expert as saying that the truly alarming thing that the Pakistan government announced on Thursday was not that the country had successfully conducted its own tests, but rather that it was already fitting nuclear warheads on top of a missle tested only last month, capable of striking most of India.

Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L Stimson Centre, an independent think-tank, said, ''A crucial threshold has been crossed, if it's true, and that means we have only two thresholds left. Deployment and use.''

The NYT says India is said to have enough fissile material for perhaps 50 nuclear devices, maybe more. Pakistan has enough for perhaps 12.

There is almost no evidence that either country has mastered the ability to make warheads small enought to fit on missiles, though not for lack of trying.

It says senior administration officials cast doubt on Pakistan's claims to have already fitted its longest range missile with nuclear warheads. ''That would be a fateful and a foolish step,'' one official said on condition of anonymity.

UNI

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