R Chidambaram, who led the team of scientists during the 1998 nuclear tests, dismissed as "absurd" suggestions that Pokhran-II explosions did not yield the desired results.
R Chidambaram, who led the team of scientists during the 1998 nuclear tests, today dismissed as "absurd" suggestions that Pokhran-II explosions did not yield the desired results.
"There is no controversy over the yield of Pokhran-II nuclear tests. The claims are absurd," Chidambaram, who was the chairman of the Department of Atomic Energy in 1998, said here.
He was reacting to former senior DRDO scientist K Santhanam's contention that Pokhran-II tests had not met the desired objective. Santhanam had said the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb in May 1998 was of low yield and not the one that would meet the country's strategic objectives.
"If he has any new scientific data which has not been answered in the results of the test published by us, we will be happy to look into it," said Chidambaram, who is currently the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Union Government.
He said the results of the 1998 nuclear tests were published in great detail in international journals and it also take into account studies by several global experts.
"If he has any new scientific information which we are not aware of, it will be nice to have that data. He is a scientist, not a politician. Let him tell exactly what made him give that comment. Who are the seismologists he is referring to. We will go and look back," Chidambaram said.
Chidambaram said the scientists at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre had done a lot of measurements on site during the Pokhran-II experiments.
"They had analysed global seismic data and examined the radioactivity in the samples recovered post-shot from near the emplacement points of the nuclear devices," he said.
Emplacement point is the exact spot where the nuclear device is placed in the shaft underground and is covered by rocks to prevent radioactivity from escaping into the atmosphere.
Six months after the nuclear tests, scientists had dug out the rocks from the emplacement points and found that they had signatures of neutron-induced radioactivity, Chidambaram said.
"They (rocks from emplacement points) have signatures of neutron induced radioactivity which can come only if the 14 MeV neutrons have been generated, which means that the thermonuclear explosive device (hydrogen bomb in common parlance) had worked," the scientist explained.
"The total yield comes out as 50 (+/- 10) kilotons for the thermonuclear device, consistent with the design yield and with the seismic estimate of the total yield," he said.
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