One of the top scientists handling India’s 1998 nuclear tests has acknowledged that the tests weren’t quite the unqualified successes they were officially hailed as. Specifically, it seems the thermonuclear (fusion) test was a dud. People outside India have said such things before, as have Indians off the public record, but it is potentially quite significant / uncomfortable that an important Indian scientist has publicly done the same:
His view was that India should not sign the CTBT and that it needed to conduct more thermonuclear tests.
“There is no country in the world,” he emphasised, “which managed to get its thermonuclear weapon right in just one test.” He said that he had also pointed to the fact that western seismic experts had doubted India’s claim that the three simultaneous tests on May 11 had a combined explosives yield of 60 kt.
The Santhanam revelation could have major reverberations in the country’s security policy. The Indo-US nuclear deal, for instance, rests upon the assumption that India will not test again.
It is also likely to make it difficult for the Manmohan Singh government to sign the CTBT, an issue that has gained considerable salience in the Obama administration’s non-proliferation policy.
[…]
Karnad, a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, felt that the Indian need to test again “is less a matter of opinion than of fact.”
In his view, Santhanam’s “extremely courageous stand” had struck a fatal blow at the foundation of the Indo-US nuclear deal “predicated on India’s never testing again and at any accommodationist policies the Manmohan Singh regime may be considering vis-a-vis the CTBT and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty”.
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