More scientists back Santhanam on Pokhran II
NEW DELHI: If the views of certain experts are any indication, disquiet is simmering within the country’s top nuclear scientists as there is an apparent bid to “hush up facts” following the sensational disclosure by fellow professional K Santhanam that the thermonuclear weapon tested in Pokhran 2 was a failure.
A Gopalakrishnan, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, told Express that BARC ex-director R Chidambaram, who is now Principal Scientific Adv iser to the Government of India, was “obviously indulging in a total misrepresentation of facts” in 1998 when he “encouraged” the then NDA government to tell the country that the blasts in the Rajasthan desert were a success.
“He might have several compulsions that made him say this when he knew the true facts. He must have been motivated partly by personal glory,” claimed Gopalakrishnan.
Chidambaram went on to receive the Padma Vibhushan after the May 11 tests.
“All this shows the DAE has been misleading the public and lying on issues. Not only in this instance, but in matters of nuclear safety and independence of safety regulations,” the 72-year-old expert maintained, adding “there are many other instances where an organisation like the AERB has been under pressure from both the PMO and the DAE to distort safety-related investigations.” He said A P J Abdul Kalam, oper ational in-charge of the blasts who later became the country’s president, possessed “very little knowledge” of nuclear weapons or the designs and physics behind them. “Also, he had only a peripheral role in the tests. But the public has since been led to believe Kalam is an expert.” The basic question in any scientist’s mind, Gopalakrishnan says, was “how one can extrapolate or modify a weapon design from the data on one single test — even if it were successful, which in this case was not”. He endorsed the setting up of a peer review for determining the efficacy of the Pokhran 2 thermonuclear device, which Dr Santhanam, a senior DRDO scientist, said failed to perform.
Dr Gopalakrishnan called for a technological committee comprising of international experts to review the “methodology used by Chidambaram and his colleagues to establish their claims”. Dr Chidambaram and S K Sikka — both weapon designers for the thermonuclear device — should “present their methodology to a technical committee involving international experts too. After that you should have a national peer review”.Another former BARC scientist, with intimate knowledge of weapons designing, expressed the doubt whether anybody in BARC had a fullscale understanding of a thermonuclear device.
“The service chiefs should put their foot down and not accept the thermonuclear weapon even if it has been weaponised,” he noted, pointing out that repeated tests for assurance was normal in any scientific endeavour.
BARC ex-head P K Iyengar, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Board, had argued in an Express article on September 2 that there was need to conduct further tests. Dr Santhanam’s disclosure showed that there was no big explosion of the kind the government claimed, he added.
Another former BARC scientist declared that everybody involved in Pokhran 2 “ought to be cross-examined under oath by a retired Supreme Court judge to get to the bottom of the matter”.
Earlier, Dr Santhanam had pointed out that shaft in which the device was detonated in Pokhran remained undisturbed and “totally intact” after the explosion. And the A Frame, which had a winch to lower personnel and equipment into the shaft for the experiment also escaped the allegedly 45 kilotonne explosion completely unscathed.
Whereas in the case of the smaller fission device, which was tested the same day, the shaft was destroyed and the explosion left a crater 25 metres in diameter. Santhanam argues that if the TN weapon functioned, the crater would have been about 70 meters in diameter.