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Pokharan II: It's not the time for euphoria

The nuclear fireworks at Pokharan on Monday and Wednesday might help India flex muscles at China and Pakistan, but technical evidence is wanting to establish the tall scientific claims.

Stopping further tests and signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty now will hamper the long-term strategic goal and the technological progress toward weaponisation. Ideally, the government should have continued the ambiguity in India's nuclear politics and waited till a ripe moment to conduct these tests.

Since the government went ahead with its weapon ambitions, albeit for political reasons, it has to take this nuclear exercise to its logical conclusion: conduct a few more series of tests to generate a sufficient and reliable database to carry out computer simulations for weapons design. It is very unlikely that this week's tests alone will take us to the Holy Grail of nuclear weapons.

By announcing to the world that it tested a thermonuclear device for the first time, India has sent a clear signal that it is aiming for something more than a minimum deterrent -- thus creating potential foes besides China and Pakistan. Secondly, the claim that we can now go into serial production of H-bombs with just one test is unconvincing. Tokyo University's seismic department has estimated the combined yield of Monday's blasts around 30 KT. Even if one attributes two-thirds of the combined yield to the alleged hydrogen blasts, it is too modest a figure to establish an H-bomb testing.

It appears now that what the scientists could have tested on Monday was some sort of a sophisticated tritium-boosted fission device. Though there is sufficient stock of tritium with the country to fabricate H-bombs -- in the megaton range -- the effort may take some more years, according to people privy to the weapons programme. Long back, Russia and the UK lulled the world into believing that they had tested a fusion bomb before having actually tested it.

No country in the world has gone into serial production of H-bombs and sophisticated fission devices with a few tests. For instance, the French defied world opinion and went ahead with a series of six tests in 1995 to get confirmatory data for some of their latest weapons design. It took the US nearly a thousand blasts before it could think of relying on computer simulation. The UK borrows data from the US for its own design studies. While facts stand like this, claims that we can now go into serial production of various types of nuclear weapons with barely a clutch of tests appear hollow.

In light of these uncertainties, it is debatable whether the design of the tested devices can be handed over directly to the armed forces for deployment.

There are conflicting claims about uranium having been used in these tests -- though the official version points toward plutonium. Generally, plutonium has a lot of disadvantages because of its low critical size and mass -- making the fabrication of a plutonium bomb more challenging than a uranium device, which has a comparatively large critical size. Moreover, very little is known in open literature about the behaviour of plutonium at high pressures -- most of the crucial information on this fissile material is still classified. It is these technical problems associated with plutonium that drove the DAE to develop another base (uranium) for the weapons programme. Towards this end, a pilot uranium enrichment plant exists at the BARC, Bombay, and in the Rare Materials Project at Ratnahalli near Mysore.

There is speculation that one of the blasts could be attributed to a uranium device. If it is true, the myth of the plutonium route towards weaponry and the dual-purpose technology of our power programme break. It is this dual-purpose motive that protects the inefficient Nuclear Power Corporation. Another case in point: it is a known fact that all the nuclear power reactors run at a much lower efficiency than what is being projected in the annual reports of the DAE and the NPC. The pro-nuke lobby has always used this as a selling line: look, even if we don't get the dividend in megawatts, we will have to get plutonium to deter our enemies.

There's an interesting aspect to this. In a normal course of operation of power reactors, different isotopes of plutonium come out as byproduct. Of these, only Pu-239 (found in traces) is of significance to the weapons programme. Nuclear engineers say that tinkering with reactor operation -- ie, running them at low efficiency -- produces weapon-grade plutonium in appreciable amounts. While plutonium required for all defence purposes can be produced from the research reactors in Trombay, why tinker with the commercial power plants? The question that now arises is whether the inefficiency of our power programme is in-built (to facilitate the weapons programme), or a cover-up to the NPC's own inefficiency.

Fuelling the economic growth of a power-starved country by controlled nuclear chain reaction remains only in the collective fantasies of our nuclear mandarins. The prospects appear rather bleak: the DAE's goal of crossing 10,000 MW by 2000 appears remote even in the next 25 years, given the lacklustre financial support from the government. The power projects at Kaiga, Tarapur, Rawatbhatta and Kudankulam are languishing on account of various technical problems and local politics.

The DAE has been showing interest, for quite some time, in buying Russian and French designed power reactors. There is thus a danger that our nuclear industry will be left at the crossroads if the DAE pursues two or more parallel power programmes. Besides ignoring various organisational problems, the nuclear establishment remains non-committal on the safety and regulatory front -- the fervent pleas to make the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board an autonomous commission has fallen on deaf ears.

It is against this background that the hype generated by the nuclear explosions should be viewed. While it's no doubt a significant progress towards nuclear weaponry -- though not to an extent as hysterically reported in the media -- there are many pressing problems faced by the nuclear establishment. The government, instead of indulging in revelry, should seriously think, if at all it is concerned about taking the country to new heights in the nuclear field, about reorienting the DAE's structure and setting things right. Or else, the temporary resurgence facilitated by Pokhran II may well diffuse into our collective forgetfulness. So, it's not time for euphoria but for stocktaking the various nuclear issues.

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