India had conducted five nuclear tests on May 11 and 13, 1998, at the Pokhran range in Rajasthan.
India's nuclear weapon system is falling short of being a "credible deterrence" against adversaries, two key pioneers and planners of Pokhran-II tests said on Friday, in significant remarks coming around the 20th anniversary of the landmark event.
India had conducted five nuclear tests on May 11 and 13, 1998, at the Pokhran range in Rajasthan.
Former Defence Research and Development Organisation scientist, K Santhanam, and Prof Bharat Karnad, part of the first National Security Advisory Board, also called for more tests to inject credibility into the nuclear weapon system. Santhanam was the field director during the 1998 tests. NSAB had been constituted soon after the tests.
"Our hydrogen bomb has limitations. It has not reached the stage of maturity. We have had only minimum success," said Santhanam.
While China has tested its nuclear device 50 times and the US on around 2,000 occasions, India has done it only twice — in 1974 and 1998.
Both experts revealed that there was an understanding to conduct tests in 2008, but it has not been discussed since. They said Pakistan has a more credible weapon technology because China has given it access to its dual-use testing facility.
Recalling days spent at Pokhran around the tests, Santhanam said they had camouflaged the area and were working during nights to dodge American satellite systems, but Pakistan had come close to knowing about it.
"Villages around had gone suspicious about our activities. One early morning, a person on a white horse breached the second-tier security. But, thankfully, he got noticed by the third layer. Possibly Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), may have picked up activities from villagers and had sent someone to confirm what was going on inside," he said.
The 58th Engineer Regiment had conducted several exercises since 1995 to avoid satellite detection. Scientists from different agencies worked at night, and early morning, the equipment were returned to the original place to give the impression that they never moved.
Karnad recalled that in 1974, then prime minister Indira Gandhi approved multiple tests, but allowed just one. He revealed that she was conveyed by the Americans to learn from the fate of Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende, who in a CIA operation, was overthrown and killed in a coup d'état in September 1973.
"The only 'man' in the Cabinet (Indira Gandhi) feared and stopped the testing," said the professor, who gave credit to India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for starting a nuclear weapon programme and keeping it top secret from the entire bureaucracy and even from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
Nehru had, however, sent messages to nuclear weapon States through Krishna Menon to either free the world from nuclear weapons or India would produce it at one-tenth of the cost.
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