When The Buddha 'First' Smiled : India's First Nuclear Detonation (PNE)

[Chanakyaa]

When Buddha First Smiled : Pokhran I , 1974​

Smiling Buddha -- an incongruous title for one of Independent India's most important achievements. This was the code name for India's first peaceful nuclear explosive, indigenously designed, and tested in May 1974.

The seed was sown in the aftermath of the 1962 Indo-China war. The belief that India needed an effective nuclear deterrent crystallised in 1964, when China conducted a nuclear test at Lop Nur.

The result was something the world would have never imagined from a country whose leadership professed its distaste for nuclear weapons in every fora, and had yet commenced an ambitious nuclear programme in the late 1940s under the leadership of Dr Homi J Bhabha and, after the maverick scientist's death in an air crash on Mount Blanc in January 1966, under the gentle guidance of Dr Vikram Sarabhai, who passed away prematurely in December 1971.

Under the leadership of Dr Homi Sethna, Dr Sarabhai's successor as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Dr Raja Ramanna, director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay, Mumbai [ Images ], India designed and manufactured its first nuclear explosive.

A top secret project, it used the services of only 75 scientists and engineers in a span of seven years (1967 to 1974). The core was put together at BARC in Trombay, then India's premier nuclear centre, before being transported to Pokhran in Rajasthan [ Images ] where the test took place.

As part of the effort to maintain secrecy around the test, then prime minister Indira Gandhi [ Images ] was not present at Pokhran; she turned up a couple of days later with Dr Sethna and Dr Ramanna. The only other people who were in the loop were her trusted advisers Pran Nath Haksar and D P Dhar; even the Cabinet was kept in the dark.

The test, scheduled for 8 am on May 18, 1974, was delayed because a jeep would not start, leaving V S Sethi, an engineer, stranded at the test site. Sethi hiked out in time, but the army's efforts to recover the jeep further delayed the shot. The test was finally conducted at 8.05 am.

Underlying the solemnity of the occasion was a twist of humour. When the hotline between Delhi [ Images ] and Pokhran did not work, Dr Ramanna apparently made his way to a nearby village, where he called Indira Gandhi on an unsecured phone line. 'The Buddha,' he is supposed to have told her, 'has finally smiled'. According to nuclearweaponarchive.org, though, this is more in the nature of urban legend.

What is undeniable is that India's 1974 test was the first confirmed nuclear test by a nation that was not a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

This was followed by a series of successful tests at Pokharan on May 11 and 13, 1998. The fact that India has now been accepted as a responsible nuclear power is underlined by the 123 Agreement between India and the United States.

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BY the start of May 1974, India was in the grip of a scorching summer of discontent though worse was to follow a year hence. The afterglow of Indira Gandhi’s tremendous triumph in the 1971 general election and the country’s brilliant victory in the Bangladesh war the same year had vanished. Monsoons had failed again.

The economy was in a shambles. However, it was the corruption and arrogance of her inner circle that had fed popular anger. Gujarat’s Nav Nirman, followed by the more formidable J.P. movement (so named after its sponsor, the highly respected Gandhian, Jayaprakash Narayan), was climaxed by a nationwide railway strike with the avowed objective — in the words of its leader, maverick Socialist George Fernandes — of “starving the country”. Indira Gandhi decided to crush it ruthlessly.

It was in this sombre atmosphere that in the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) on May 18 something startling happened. A huge, restive crowd at a bus stop, vainly waiting for transport of any kind, suddenly burst into cheers. News had just come in that India had conducted an underground nuclear test that morning at a place called Pokhran in distant Rajasthan. This reaction was symptomatic of the ecstatic welcome most Indians gave their country’s entry into the Nuclear Club.

The sensational news was a complete surprise to everyone, including the peeved nuclear powers that had failed to detect the underground explosion. India insisted that the event at Pokhran was a peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE) — both the United States and the Soviet Union had been conducting several of these — although there is no difference in the PNE technology and that for exploding a nuclear weapon.

Two separate and interconnected reasons led to Indira Gandhi’s resolve to conduct the test although its roots really went back to her father, Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. It is difficult to think of another person so thoroughly opposed to nuclear weapons as he.

Yet all through his life — since 1946 indeed — he also held steadfastly to the policy that India must develop the technology to build these weapons, should the need arise, especially if others refused to abjure them. (With the solitary exception of Morarji Desai in 1977, all Nehru’s successors have broadly shared this approach.).

Against this backdrop, the first reason for Pokhran-I burst into the open within five months of Nehru’s death. On October 16, 1964 China’s first nuclear bomb went up at Lop Nor. Coincidentally, Nikita Khrushchev, who had denied China a nuclear weapon design, went down in Moscow on the same day.

In New Delhi, K. Subrahmanyam, the country’s premier security analyst, then a deputy secretary in the defence ministry, sent a top-secret note to the defence secretary suggesting that a committee, headed by the legendary Homi Bhabha, should devise India’s response to the Chinese challenge. In the ministry of external affairs, K. R. Narayanan, then director, China (later President) also advised the government to “exercise the nuclear option”. If a personal note is permissible, a week ahead of them, in The Statesman (October 9) I had pleaded for an Indian nuclear weapons programme because the “mushroom cloud was about to appear on the Himalayas.”

For his part, Bhabha made no secret of his conviction that India could produce a nuclear bomb in 18 months at no more than Rs. 30 lakhs each. Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and other political leaders were not yet prepared to go that far even though pressure within the Congress party to go nuclear was on the increase. K. C. Pant, later defence minister, and Krishan Kant, later vice-president, were principal advocates of nuclear weapons.

What Shastri did authorise, however, was a Subterranean Nuclear Exploration Project (SNEP). It did not make headway because of deaths in quick succession of both Shastri and Bhabha. Like Shastri, Indira Gandhi also wasted some time in the meaningless search for a “nuclear security umbrella” by the two superpowers.

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Profound foreign policy and security developments during 1971 — Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China and his subsequent warning that in case China became involved in the crisis in Bangladesh, India should not expect American support; the signing of the Indo-Soviet treaty Indira Gandhi wasn’t enthusiastic about until then; and above all, America’s dispatch of the Enterprise-led nuclear task force to the Bay of Bengal during the Bangladesh War — became the second and clinching reason for taking the plunge.

Indira Gandhi’s numerous critics have roundly blamed her for conducting the test for purely political reasons. Nothing cam be farther from the truth. At the time of Pokhran-I she was doubtless beleaguered. But she had authorised the test in September 1972 when her popularity was at its peak.

As the news of detonation spread, in distant Washington, Denis Kux, officer in change of the India desk at the state department, prepared a scathing draft criticising the “Indian test”. But Kissinger, then in the Middle East, toned it down, arguing that the Indian explosion was an “accomplished fact” and “public scolding” would only “add to US-India bilateral problems”. However, this did not prevent the US from imposing the harshest sanctions on this country.

Details of the long and secret decision-making process cannot be discussed in available space. But a crucial meeting just before the PNE deserves a mention. The issue was whether to go ahead and “push the button”. According to an account by Raja Ramanna, the mastermind of the venture, two of Indira Gandhi’s top advisers, P. N. Haksar and P. N. Dhar, were opposed to it, and wanted it postponed. Homi Sethna, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, offered no opinion. D. Nag Chaudhuri, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister started weighing pros and cons but was cut short by the prime minister. “Dr. Ramanna,” she said. turning to him, “please go ahead. It would be good for the country”. The next morning “the Buddha smiled”.

Her critics have a point when they say that, faced with furious international reaction, especially from the US and Canada (the latter had provided the Cirus reactor at Trombay), she “developed cold feet” and did not follow up on Pokhran-I. Consequently, there was a gap of 24 years between Pokhran-I and Pokhran-II. But that’s a different story.

H.J. Bhabha : The Man Behind Nuclear & Scientific India

Full credit for the establishment of India's nuclear research program, and its nuclear weapons program, must be given to Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, a man who throughout his life dominated both the scientific and policy spheres of India's nuclear affairs, first bringing the Indian nuclear program to life and then setting its priorities and direction.


Bhabha was born in 1909, of a wealthy well connected Parsi family. Bhabha's uncle was Sir Dorab Tata (married to Bhabha's father's sister), son of the founder of the powerful Tata group. Bhabha grew up in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) while his father was inspector general of education in Mysore.

In 1927, at age 18, Bhabha sailed to England to study engineering at Cambridge. He soon decided that his true interest was in nuclear physics, a field then flowering with Cambridge as one of its centers. Bhabha received a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University in 1935, studying the physics of cosmic rays. While in Europe he met many of the greatest physicists of the day, who would later play major roles in the US-UK wartime atomic weapon programs -- among them Niels Bohr, James Franck, and Enrico Fermi. Bhabha was well respected within the international physics community, and has left his name associated with the phenomenon of Bhabha electron scattering. One of Bhabha's friendships at Cambridge would later play a prominent role in the development of India's nuclear program - his friendship with his rowing teammate W.B. Lewis, later chairman of the Canadian Energy Programme.

Bhabha learned of the discovery of fission while abroad. He returned to India in 1939, taking the post of Reader in Theoretical Physics at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore under Nobel laureate Sir C.V. Raman.

Bhabha showed an immediate visionary interest in nuclear technology, apparently independently detecting the existence of the Manhattan Project during the war by noticing the absence of publications from the leading physicists with which he was acquainted. In March 1944, even before the successful achievement of a chain reaction became publicly known, Bhabha wrote a proposal to the Tata Trust that led to the establishment of an institute for nuclear research in India. This institute, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) named for Bhabha's uncle, was created on 19 December 1945 in Mumbai with Dr. Bhabha as its Director. And so from the very outset, only four months after Hiroshima and years before India became an independent nation, Bhabha was already in command of India's nuclear future. And so he remained until the moment of his death over 20 years later.

Bhabha was acquainted with India's first Prime Minister Jawarhalal Pandit Nehru, having met him on the voyage home in 1939. After Nehru became the new nation's first leader Bhabha was entrusted with complete authority over all nuclear related affairs and programs and answered only to Nehru himself, with whom he developed a close personal relationship. All Indian nuclear policy was set by unwritten personal understandings between Nehru and Bhabha.

From the outset Bhabha's plans for India where extraordinarily ambitious. In April 1948 Nehru agreed to legislate at Bhabha's request the Atomic Energy Act in the Constituent Assembly, creating the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC).

On 3 January 1954 the IAEC decided to set up a new facility - the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET), later to become the "Indian Los Alamos". On 3 August 1954 the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) was created with Dr. Bhabha as Secretary. This department answered directly to the Prime Minister and has continued to do so down to the present day.

Bhabha personally recruited and sponsored many of the principal players in the successful efforts to develop and test nuclear weapons such as Homi Sethna, P.K. Iyengar (hired 1952), Vasudev Iya, and Raja Ramanna -- hired by Bhabha in 1949 and given a J.N. Tata scholarship at King's College in London.

Ramanna confirms that Bhabha planned from the very outset to establish an Indian nuclear weapons capability. Bhabha told Ramanna during that period that

"We must have the capability. We should first prove ourselves and then talk of Gandhi, non-violence and a world without nuclear weapons."
[Chengappa 2000; pg. 82].
Although Nehru founded the non-aligned movement, and generally promoted disarmament efforts, his biographer S. Gopal stated in 1997 that Nehru actually opposed complete abolition of nuclear weapons [Chengappa 2000, pg. 83], and supported Bhabha's plans for developing an Indian nuclear weapons option.

In 1955 Bhabha's personal relationsip with Lewis was instrumental in the program to build Cirus, the Canadian heavy water reactor - ostensibly for peaceful research but desired by India for its potential as an ideal system for producing weapons grade plutonium, a capability later exploited.

The power that Bhabha held is no where more sharply illustrated by the fact that in the wake of China's first nuclear test PM Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nehru's successor, found it necessary to align his policies with the preferences of Dr. Bhabha, and secure his personal endorsement to withstand legislative and public criticism.

The earlier pattern of Bhabha and the Prime Minister privately setting Indian nuclear policy, which had been established under Nehru, continued under Shastri. This pattern had disastrous results in 1966 when PM Shastri died of a heart attack, on 11 January 1966, and just two weeks later on January 24, a day after Shastri's successor Indira Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister, Dr. Homi Bhabha was killed while on a trip to Europe when the plane in which he was flying collided with Mount Blanc. India's impressively large nuclear establishment was suddenly left without any plan or policy to give it direction.

 

[Ammyy]

A great great achievement for India and our scientist that they achieve this mile stone so early



I dnt like Indira Gandhi but really a big fan of her foreign policy......

 

[shrivatsa]

great read xinix

 

[kingdurgaking]

hail the father...