Hollowing Institutions

The Atomic Energy Commission acted like a kangaroo court on an issue that is vital for our security


National Security Adviser, M.K. Narayanan has said that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which comprises “a peer group of scientists”, last week came out with the “most authoritative” statement on the efficacy of the 1998 nuclear tests and no more clarification was required from the government.
This sounds authoritative, and even definitive. Till you look closer, and two points stick out. First, the AEC is an arm of the Department of Atomic Energy, in fact chaired by Anil Kakodkar, its current head.
It is the DAE’s assessment of the thermonuclear test of 1998 that is on trial. Yet, the NSA insists “They [AEC] were satisfied in 1998 and they were satisfied in 2009.” Ergo, there is nothing to discuss .
The AEC is not a peer group of scientists as Narayanan claims. Just check up the DAE website and you will discover the horrific truth. Besides Kakodkar, it comprises of worthies like Prithviraj Chavan, Minister in the PMO, K.M. Chandrashekhar, Cabinet Secretary , Ashok Chawla, Finance Secretary, T.K. A. Nair, Principal Secretary to the PM, S.V. Ranganath, an IAS officer, and M.K Narayanan himself.

Anil Kakodkar, DAE chief and National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan

There are two more nuclear physicists—S. Banerjee and M.R. Srinivasan and two others P. Rama Rao, a metallurgist and C.N.R. Rao, a chemist, and K. Muralidhar, a management functionary at the DAE. To sum up, there are seven bureaucrats and five scientists , in the commission. Could these people have provided the “most authoritative” statement on the efficacy of the 1998 nuclear tests?

NSA
What does this say about the office of the National Security Adviser himself ? Confronted with a problem, he is choosing to sweep it under the carpet. The charge that the hydrogen bomb test did not achieve the desired result has not been made by Santhanam alone, though his testimony is hugely important.
It was made by another arm of the government—the Aviation Research Centre—formerly the technical wing of R&AW. The ARC seismic array at Karnal, specifically designed to pick up underground nuclear tests, too, came to the conclusion that the thermonuclear test was a “fizzle.”
The government was thus provided three sets of reports—a 50-page report by the DRDO based on the on-site instrumentation that it had set up, a detailed report based on the seismic readings picked up by the ARC in its various facilities, and a report by the DAE based on some seismic instruments it had brought onsite at the last minute.

K. Santhanam during the course of a press conference in New Delhi

So there were two sets of instruments at Pokhran on May 11 and three sets of readings available to the government. Any National Security Adviser would have constituted a high-level specialist group to get to the bottom of the issue. Instead, Mr Narayanan is choosing the classic Indian method of shooting the messenger.
Narayanan’s casual approach to the issue is symptomatic of his functioning as the NSA. When he assumed office, there were great expectations that an intelligence professional would carry out the deep reforms needed in our intelligence services. But his first term has been disappointing, to say the least.
He did not even press the reforms that had been recommended by the NDA government’s group of ministers. So, the Multi Agency Centre to coordinate anti-terrorism activity failed to take root till the Mumbai attack which was only late last year. The National Technical Research Office which was to take over all the high-tech intelligence functions was given a step-child treatment through most of the term.
It was, again, only after Mumbai carnage that crucial projects and funds for the outfit were approved. As for the country’s external intelligence organization, the Research & Analysis Wing, it is true that it was already suffering from problems before Narayanan became the intelligence czar. Unfortunately, he has done little about them and the outfit continues to suffer from low morale and a lack of direction.
It is more difficult to assess Narayanan’s role as the Special Representative (SR) for the talks on China. In the first part of the same TV interview in which he excoriated Santhanam, the NSA boasted that the last round of the border talks he had with his counterpart Dai Bingguo in August, was the best among the nine rounds of meetings the two officials had had till now.
This is clearly a shading of the truth. The Special Representative process came after eight rounds of border talks between 1981 and 1987 and an additional 14 Joint Working Group meetings between 1988 and 2003. The job of the SRs was to quickly clinch the border issue. There was every indication that agreement was in sight in April 2005 when Wen Jiabao came to New Delhi and signed the agreement on political parameters and guiding principles of defining the Sino-Indian border. Then something changed. Mr Narayanan is entitled not to tell us what happened. But surely he should not pass of a stalled process, a failure, as a success.

Neutering
The NSA’s office, or the AEC are actually symptomatic of the state of institutions in the country. Take an example from another extreme—the National Human Rights Commission. In its short history, there has been just about one ruling—that on Gujarat —through which the body has upheld its own mandate. Since then things have done downhill. The low-point has been the manner in which it dismissed the Batla House encounter by upholding the police inquiry instead of conducting its own investigation and hearings.
Then take the other institution on which such great hopes were placed, the Central Vigilance Commission. After a thunderous beginning the institution has now lapsed from public consciousness. We know the reason. It has been neutered. The next institution that is likely to suffer the same fate is the Central Information Commission.

Destructive
With Wajahat Habibullah as head, the outfit has aggressively pursued the rights of the citizens for information. Soon he will retire and the government has given indications that it will put a pliant official at the head of the institution.
The Congress party must take a major share of the blame for this state of affairs. It has always had a “system destructive” attitude towards institutions. Indira Gandhi did something to the GOP’s DNA that compels it to take the low road when it comes to shoring up institutions. A manifestation of this was the appointment of Navin Chawla, a bureaucrat closely identified to the party, as the Chief Election Commissioner on the eve of the general elections.
So now we have the AEC— its founding resolution was proudly tabled in the Lok Sabha by Jawaharlal Nehru himself in March 1958— behaving more like a kangaroo court than an impartial group of officials and scientists who steer the country’s nuclear policy.
The hardening of the arteries of institutions, especially those related to science, is a phenomena that affects many countries. But when it happens in a young nation, one that still has a long way to go to establish itself, then it is the sign of a life-threatening disease.
This article appeared in Mail Today September 23, 2009

H-bomb failure demands that we re-write our nuclear strategy and doctrine

Facts have consequences, especially facts that are inconvenient. The fact that India's hydrogen bomb failed in its first and only test is one such truth. It has consequences for the country's nuclear doctrine, force posture as well as foreign policy issues relating to the US and China, and our approach to the comprehensive test ban treaty and the fissile material cut off treaty.
In such circumstances what was considered true in the past must be discarded and new choices must be made. Take the most important one. Should India resume nuclear testing? There will be some who argue that the logic of the situation demands just that. I, for one, am agnostic. India is not a bold country. Our conduct during the 1998 nuclear tests itself suggests that.
Having broken the informal embargo on nuclear tests, we rushed in indecent haste to reassure the world of the goodness of our heart. This took two forms — first the offer of the pledge of no first use and a defensive nuclear doctrine. The second, the commitment to a unilateral moratorium. Both were made hurriedly and did not benefit from a wider debate in the government or the country.

Testing
2009 is not the same as 1998. The most important difference is the relative power of China and the US. The last time around, a quick genuflection to the US, prevented the wrath of Beijing. Recall, that in the wake of the tests, the UN Security Council had passed Resolution 1172 which demanded, among other things, that “India and Pakistan immediately stop their nuclear weapon development programmes, refrain from weaponisation or from the deployment of nuclear weapons, cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.”
Even as late as 2000, China was pressing the world community to act on this resolution. It was only when it became clear that Washington was using the Indian dissonance with China to build bridges with New Delhi, that Beijing changed tack.

Vajpayee at fission-bomb test site, the most impressive at Pokhran. With him are to his left, R. Chidambaram, head of the DAE and to his right, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

In the present circumstances, renewed testing by India could be hazardous to our health. Things are not likely to play out as they did the last time.
Fresh tests would terminate the Indo-US nuclear deal because the Hyde Act that enabled it only provides for a waiver for Indian nuclear tests till May 13, 1998. It would also pit India against the international system which is now readying itself to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. Fire-eaters will argue that India should bash on regardless and stick it out as a pariah in the international system because its security is paramount.
I would argue for a middle-path because we know India lacks the stamina to make it alone as China did in the 1949-1970 period. Also it would confront us with the choice of forfeiting our economic destiny.
We must make do with what we have and this time we must do it well. Till now the Indian effort at weaponising its deterrent has been as fitful and lethargic as the pace of its missile programmes. Both are seriously lagging that of even Pakistan. For obvious reasons we could not weaponise the flawed thermonuclear design, but we do have a reliable fission weapon which yielded 25kT in the May 1998 test. This design could be safely boosted to a weapon of at least 50kT.
A great deal of work remains to be done in the missile field. The Agni series needs to be locked down by a series of tests to prove its reliability and accuracy. The Brahmos needs to be transformed into a longer range cruise missile capable of reaching 900-1500 km. Both the weapons and the missiles should be handed over to the armed forces, though the country may still choose to keep its weapons in a dis-assembled form.

Doctrine
But first we need to alter our nuclear doctrine so that it can guide us to a different kind of force posture. The doctrine of 1998 was a slapdash job. It did not arise from Indian practice or goals, but was imposed top down to convince the world that our arsenal was purely for defence and that it would be a minimalist one, though its credibility would be assured by the fact that it was in a triad of land and sea-based and air-dropped weapons.
Just how incomplete a job it was became apparent when India confronted Pakistan in the wake of the attack on Parliament in 2001 and found that our doctrine did not cover the possibility of nuclear strikes on Indian forces operating outside our national territory.
The biggest hole in it was that at the time it was enunciated, India did not have the wherewithal for the massive retaliation, or to use the politically more correct term, inflict “unacceptable” destruction and punishment on the adversary, that it promised. While doctrines may precede capability, we are now confronted with the fact that we do not have the key weapon we thought we had for inflicting massive retaliation — a thermonuclear bomb.
The Indian doctrine implied that since we had offered a “no first use” pledge, we would sustain a first strike by an adversary and then retaliate massively. This assumed that some of our already minimalist arsenal would also be destroyed in the adversary’s strike. And so there was need for, first, measures to secure our weapons against such strikes. And, second, to have weapons that would inflict the crushing retaliation.




If you take these two factors, it implied that an Indian retaliation would be of the “counter-value” type, targeting cities and population centres. These “city-busting” strikes rested on the possession of 200-300 kilotonne weapons, which cannot but be of the fusion or thermonuclear kind.

Capability
The revelations about the failure of the thermonuclear bomb means that new choices will now have to be made about our force structure since it could take 15- 20 bombs of the 25 kT variety to obtain the kind of destruction a single 200 kT thermonuclear bomb wreaks.
So out goes the minimalist posture. If we are to have a credible force, we need to redo the sums about the size of the arsenal. We also need to work out different ways of deploying and using our weapons and getting our armed forces into the picture, instead of keeping them out as is the case now.
Our new doctrine and re-engineered capabilities must be able to re-endorse the credibility of our retaliatory capabilities— minus the thermonuclear bomb. A “no first use” pledge could be a luxury in the present circumstances.
What we need is a system that will provide a guarantee that a nuclear attack on India will meet with assured retaliation.
This article appeared in Mail Today September 19, 2009

R&AW's technical wing, the ARC, also tagged the h-bomb as a failure

The government is choosing to ignore evidence that India’s 1998 hydrogen bomb test was a failure. Not only has it disregarded the report of the Defence Research and Development Organisation team led by scientist K. Santhanam, that carried out the tests, but it has paid little heed to the detailed information provided by a super-secret facility of the Aviation Research Centre, the technical wing of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research & Analysis Wing.
On Tuesday, the Atomic Energy Commission upheld the figure of 45 kilo tonne yield for the hydrogen bomb test of May 11. But the Karnal seismic array maintained by the ARC had come up with a figure of just 20-25 kilo tonne yield, which was in consonance with the figures that the DRDO instruments had recorded.
The facility at Karnal, in Harayana, which was specifically set up in the wake of the first Chinese nuclear test in October 1964, in association with the United States National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, have ultra-sophisticated instrumentation obtained from the US. “These are more sophisticated than anything that the Department of Atomic Energy has,” said a source. They are designed to track underground nuclear weapon tests and have their instruments in a deep vertical shaft dug deep into the ground, in contrast to the system mounted on the surface at the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) facility in Gauribidanur in Karnataka.
The R&AW collated all its findings and after analyzing them, sent them to on to the government, presumably the Prime Minister’s Office. These findings, which were in agreement with those of the instruments set up by the DRDO on the test site, created consternation within the government.
There were several meetings held to reconcile the reports it had received from the DRDO, the Department of Atomic Energy and the ARC and finally, the then National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra convened a meeting of the DAE, DRDO representatives along with the three armed forces chiefs sometime in October 1998. Since the two scientific organisations stuck to their positions, Mishra took a “voice vote” which decided that the DRDO was wrong and the DAE was right. An official familiar with the meeting noted that the ARC representative was not invited for the meeting.
“The decision to declare the hydrogen bomb a success was more of a political fatwa than a considered scientific-technical determination,” says Santhanam.
The NDA government’s response was an outcome of two interconnected factors. First, the admission of failure would have been politically damaging. Second, the tests had enraged the United States and New Delhi was simply not willing to prolong the process and it quickly declared a unilateral moratorium on further testing.

A view of the crater formed by the May 11 fission bomb test which yielded 25 kilotonnes. Note the distinct crater approximately 35m diameter

The picture of the shaft where the thermonuclear bomb was tested. This was supposed to be twice as powerful as the fission bomb, yet the shaft is intact

Another view of the thermonuclear test shaft area which shows no virtually no crater

Santhanam has since spelt out the reasons why he made his claim that the test was a fizzle. He has pointed out that the key instrumentation—those for measuring acceleration and the ground movement-- were all put in place by the DRDO. “They were in the shaft and radiating outward from the location of the device to the bunkers where the recording instruments were some 2-3 kms away,” he said. He said these had been calibrated “several hundred times” and had little room for malfunction. The readings of the instruments are then factored into mathematical equations that provide estimates of the yield. He has also pointed to the fact that the shaft with the hydrogen bomb device had remained intact, in contrast to the fission bomb one which produced a crater some 35m wide.
While the DAE has claimed that the DRDO’s seismic systems had malfunctioned, they have not yet responded to the fact that there was another, more sophisticated test, called the CORRTEX test. The Corrtex estimates the size of the explosion by measuring the time it takes to crush a cable inserted into the test shaft. In the case of the Pokhran tests, the Terminal Ballistics Laboratory, Chandigarh had a more sophisticated and sensitive system using a fibre-optic cable which gave an estimate of the yield in terms of the time the shock wave takes for the light to be extinguished in the cable.
The ARC is now part of the National Technical Research Office (NTRO) and the scientist who carried out the analysis is still in service with the outfit. And another source has pointed out, that the same facility had given a yield for the 1974 test as being below the than the one claimed.
The history of American technical involvement in monitoring Chinese weapons of mass destruction (WMD) activity is well-known because of the infamous Nanda Devi episode where a nuclear-powered communications intelligence device was emplaced high up on the mountain in the Uttarakhand Himalaya and later it vanished provoking fears of nuclear contamination of the rivers of the Ganga system.
The ARC, whose first head was the legendary Ram Nath Kao, was set up with US technical assistance and was involved in gathering intelligence on China from Tibet. Its task was mainly electronic and photo-intelligence collection from a string of bases in Charbatia, Orissa, Dum Dama, Assam, Sarsawa, U.P. and the Palam airport, Delhi. The monitoring of the Chinese WMD activity was also seen as part of India’s defence effort, though the output was shared with the US, though for how long, is not clear.

A slightly different version was published as the lead story in Mail Today September 18, 2009

Pokhran II: Nailing the lie

Since this is an archival blog of my writings in the newspaper I am working for, I don't normally post articles from elsewhere. But since so much controversy was generated over the article on the failure of the thermonuclear bomb that I am posting this article by K. Santhanam and Ashok Parthasarthy that appeared in The Hindu today. Santhanam was, of course, the field director of the Pokhran tests. He is a nuclear scientist who began his career at the BARC and was then sent to work in a secret organisation to track Pakistan's nuclear activities. Thereafter he surfaced in DRDO from where he coordinated India's nuclear programme from the early 1980s till Pokhran II.

Several inaccuracies in the claims made by BARC and in the articles published in the press, including The Hindu, on Pokhran-II need to be corrected. We have hard evidence on a purely factual basis, to inform the nation that not only was the yield of the second fusion (H-bomb) stage of the thermonuclear (TN) device tested in May 1998 was not only far below the design prediction made by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), but that it actually failed. Read the article

Why police turn into murderers

On September 14, speaking at the annual Directors General of Police meeting, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram acknowledged the role of Indian nationals and groups in supporting Pakistani terror We were able to bust 12 terrorist modules last year," PC pointed out, " Already this year we have neutralised 13. Terrorist groups, including the LeT and JeM continue to find new ways and means of deniability. They find support among disgruntled elements within India. Cells and modules within our country lend an Indian character to these terror strikes."
The following article tells us why this happens.


Once again the country has to suffer the humiliation of learning about the criminal acts of its custodians of the law. For long there has been suspicion that the 19-year old Ishrat Jehan, her fiance, Javed Shaikh and two others were killed in 2004 by the Gujarat police, rather than being gunned down in an encounter. Now a magisterial inquiry has confirmed the fact that the four were killed in cold blood.
One of the key attributes of a state — in contrast to institutions like corporations, foundations or, say, universities — is that it holds a monopoly of violence. But this is exercised through due process defined by the state’s constitution and law. Nowhere does Indian law and constitution give the police any authority to execute anyone, even terrorists. Even the prime minister cannot order such an execution and the army and police fighting insurgents can do so only by the authority of special legislation.



The right to take a life — of a terrorist or criminal — is the exclusive preserve of the judiciary. As the record shows, it exercises this right through a fairly detailed legal process and even then applies the death sentence in the “rarest of the rare” cases. Any killing outside these parameters is murder and should be treated as such.

Fake
Fake encounters belong to a special category: People are killed in “cold blood” — executed illegally usually after they have been taken into custody. There are two kinds of fake encounters. In the first, the police kill known terrorists and criminals because they believe that they dispense better justice.
The more monstrous kind of an execution, is when completely innocent people are killed and passed off as terrorists and criminals. This is nothing but murder and, since it has been carried out by the custodians of the law, it should attract a much harsher penalty, than an act of murder by an ordinary citizen.
One of the key markers of a fake encounter in India is when all the allegedly bad people are gunned down and the police party takes no casualties, despite dozens of bullets flying around. Almost every genuine encounter, especially one involving the highly trained Lashkar-Tayyeba, results in the death of one or more security personnel. And so it was in this case.
The terrorists had an AK-56 and they sprayed the police party with it. The police fired back with Sten guns and service revolvers. But the Forensic Science Laboratory found only AK-56 empties at the site, not a single Sten or revolver empty. The FSL also failed to find any trace of gunpowder or ammunition on the dead.
Further, the FSL found that contrary to the police claim that they fired at the group who were in a car from some 60-70 feet away, the four had been shot at close range.
There were other tell-tale signs which the incompetent policemen could not avoid — each of those killed seemed to have some identification on them. The alleged Pakistani Amjad Ali aka Salim, conveniently had a photo of himself in his pocket; Zeeshan Zohar had his identity card and nothing else, no money or other trivia; likewise Javed had his driving licence and nothing else and Ishrat had her college identity card taped around her neck. How convenient.
The key impulse for fake executions come from politicians. They first mess up a situation and then they want the police to use strong-arm methods to resolve the problem. This was the background for the shameful illegal executions that marred the counter-terrorist effort of the police in Punjab in the 1990s, the anti-Maoist operations in Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere. The same has happened in the case of fighting Islamist terrorism. Having created an enormous pool of angry Muslims in the wake of the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat, the Narendra Modi government depended on a bunch of killers in uniform for protection from vengeance. These policemen played on the fears of Modi and Co and took to gunning down innocent Muslims, claiming that they were involved in plots to kill the Gujarat chief minister.
On March 2006, four Kashmiri youth, allegedly Lashkar-e-Tayyeba men, were gunned down on the outskirts of Ahmedabad; in November 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kausar Bi and one other person were killed; in June 2004, Ishrat Jehan, Javed Shaikh and two others were gunned down; in January 2003, Sadiq Jamal was shot dead, allegedly while plotting to kill L.K. Advani; in October 2002, Samir Khan Pathan was killed while trying to escape, again after his arrest for an alleged plot to kill Modi.
The BJP may be right in claiming that Modi could not be held responsible for everything that happened in Gujarat, but Modi bears more than mere moral responsibility; he actively promoted and encouraged such police personnel and protected them when they were exposed.

Intelligence Bureau
During the last state assembly election campaign, Mr Modi used Sohrabuddin’s killing to gather votes. According to the reports, Modi asked the people gathered in a rally, “What should be done to a man who stored illegal arms and ammunition? You tell me what should have been done to Sohrabuddin?” The people answered, “Kill him, kill him”.
Even if by this twisted logic Modi justified Sohrabuddin’s killing, he did not explain why Kausar Bi, his innocent wife, was also murdered by his police.
Modi, of course, is not the only political leader who has feasted of the death of innocent people. The moral compass has been found wanting in many Congress politicians as well.
Lives are cheap in India, especially if they belong to the poor or “the other” —minorities and people of other faiths. There are also serious questions about the role of the Union government, especially the Intelligence Bureau in these killings.
In many instances the executions have been sanctioned by the IB which is an intelligence organisation and operates outside the boundaries of the law, and unfortunately, the supervision of the union government and parliament
as well.

Whirlwind
India is perhaps the only democracy where no oversight is exercised on our all-powerful intelligence services by parliament and even the government. Our politicians’ main interest is in the IB providing them political intelligence on their adversaries.
The IB’s goals are two-fold. First, they want to short-circuit the process of dealing with terrorists. But to allow an instrument of state to illegally arrogate such a key function of the state is to invite trouble.
Second, the IB uses fake encounters to send messages to Pakistan. The executioners of the mainly Pakistani terrorists are the special cells of state police forces. But over time these executioners, glorified as “encounter specialists”, end up becoming criminals and resort to killing innocents for personal gain.
One of the major causes of violent extremism aka terrorism, is a sense of injustice. Fake encounters and extra-judicial killings only help terrorist recruiting agents. Upholding the law, and insisting that the police do so most rigorously, should not be a matter of morality and legalism, but the pragmatic means of combating terrorism.
Extra-judicial executions look attractive in the short-term, but they are a recipe for long-term disaster. If you sow the wind, the saying goes, you will reap the whirlwind.
This article was published first in Mail Today September 10, 2009

The issue is not "belief" but validation

The thermonuclear test controversy has the government declaring its "belief" that the "scientists" are right. But scientists can lie, and in this case they have. The issue is scientific validation. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, it can be done through a review in which top scientists like P.K. Iyengar, Homi Sethna and others are involved.


The Prime Minister has declared, “we believe our scientists”, to counter the revelation by former DRDO nuclear weapons programme director K. Santhanam that our thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb test of May 11 1998 was a fizzle.
This sounds like an invocation to deity. But scientists are not gods, or infallible prophets. Like other human beings they can and do lie, or shade the truth, for an assortment of reasons, not the least, to protect their own reputations and further their careers.
And what a trajectory some of those careers have taken. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the rocket engineer who was Santhanam’s boss at the DRDO already had a Bharat Ratna, and so his reward has been the presidency of the republic. R. Chidambaram, the chairman of the department of atomic energy at the time, got every Tambrahm bureaucrat’s dream — a life-time sinecure in the government. Since his retirement in 2000, he has been Principal Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister.


Kalam has been one of the best presidents India has had, and it is a pity he was not re-nominated to the office. He is a decent and empathetic human being and has been an inspirational manager who brings out the maximum from his team. By the time the nuclear tests took place he was already an iconic figure.
But he was not a nuclear physicist. His knowledge of the subject would be that of a good B.Sc student. He was, of course, the head of department of the DRDO when the nuclear test took place. But his point man on the bomb programme was Santhanam.
Public record shows that the DRDO collected the nuclear devices from BARC in Mumbai, took it to Pokhran, and took it down the various shafts that had been readied. They laid the cables and instruments to record the outcome of the tests, and then carried out the tests. Santhanam has been clever in attributing the seismic information questioning the efficacy of the thermonuclear test to western sources so as not to fall afoul of the Official Secrets Act. But we can deduce that the DRDO readings, too, indicated a sub-optimal performance of the device.

K. Santhanam (r) handing over the firing keys to the range safety officer Col Vasudev (l) on May 11, 1998 at Pokhran. Looking on is current Department of Atomic Energy chief Anil Kakodkar

There was reportedly another type of a test called the CORRTEX, but no details of its outcome are available. (Note: Since the article appeared in print, I found out that a CORRTEX did indeed take place and its findings, too, confirmed the fact that the test was a "fizzle".) But this, too, would have been under DRDO’s auspices. Santhanam reportedly sent a detailed note on the May 11 and 13th nuclear tests to the government. The DAE subsequently drilled holes into the cavities formed by the tests and conducted radio-chemical analyses. Some of its officials subsequently wrote papers backing the official yield for the tests.

Yield
But the problem is not scientific, but political. Having had the guts to test, the NDA soon developed cold feet. Actors like Jaswant Singh quickly wanted to reassure the US and declared that India would commit itself to a no first use posture. Later, Prime Minister Vajpayee declared that India would maintain a unilateral moratorium on testing. So, it was necessary for the government to accept that the tests had, indeed, been a resounding success. A meeting to discuss the contradictory DRDO and DAE findings decided that the former’s equipment “malfunctioned”, and that the DAE findings were accurate, since they were also validated by a seismic array station run by them at Gauribidanur.
Kalam’s own career as a bureaucrat is a cautionary tale about our sarkari scientists. Whatever may have been his successes as SLV-3 project manager, his tenure as DRDO chief has been something of a disaster. The public is familiar with the fact that three of the four missiles that were part of the Integrated Missile Development Programme that he headed in the 1983-1993 period, failed to reach the development stage.
But they do not know that the fourth, the Prithvi, too, is of little value. A bulky and cumbersome missile is vulnerable to anti-missile defences and since it requires the services of as many as three large vehicles — the TEL carrying the missile, a power supply and a command post truck — it is a sitting duck in today’s networked battlefield.

Kalam
But, Kalam’s bigger failure was with Agni. On his insistence, the first Agni, now conveniently called a “technology demonstrator”, was a peculiar hybrid of the SLV I and the Prithvi. Only reluctantly was he persuaded to make a missile with a solid-solid configuration. This has meant that both the stages of the missile were actually built by the Indian Space Research Organisation. Today this is called Agni-II, though it has been declared successful after only two tests.
Kalam’s departure also led to a discreet parking of the Prithvi as a battlefield support missile with the Army’s artillery battalions. For Pakistan-specific nuclear delivery, the DRDO came up with a 700-km solid propelled Agni which is now called Agni I only in 2002 because, till he was in service, Kalam insisted that the Prithvi could do the job. Because of these diversions, India’s long-range missile deterrent has been delayed by about a decade and even today it depends on aircraft dropped weapons, not missile borne, for its credible minimum deterrent.
The list of Kalam’s failures is long, but some stand out. In the late 1980s, when the Aeronautical Development Establishment which was developing the Pilotless Target Aircraft, wanted to launch a cruise missile programme, Kalam, a ballistic missile man, put his foot down. In the 1980s, India could have accessed any Soviet technology it wanted, but Kalam’s ballistic missile obsession obscured his vision.
The result is that today India has no cruise missile of its own while Pakistan is on the verge of deploying its 800-km range Babur and another Air Launched Cruise Missile called Ra’ad. India has had to develop the Brahmos with Russia, but its range is limited because of Moscow’s Missile Technology Control Regime commitments.
Another significant failure was in the acquisition of the weapons locating radar. In the early 1990s, the US offered us their AN/TPPQ 37 as a gesture of friendship (conditioned by the fact they had already supplied it to Islamabad and that this was a clearly “defensive” system). Kalam declared that the DRDO would make its own. By early 1998, it became clear that the DRDO project was not working. Kalam told the government to buy one system for the DRDO to reverse engineer. By that time it was too late; in the wake of the Pokhran test, the US embargoed India and the offer stood withdrawn. So, Indian artillery operated blind in the Kargil war of 1999.

Solutions
Kalam’s very prestige became his, and his country’s, worst enemy. He had attained oracular status by 1998, and the result was that the governments of the day blindly accepted what he had to say. He was not willfully dishonest, but his fixations and whims led to diversions and delays for which the country has paid a huge price. Perhaps his greatest, and in a sense forgivable, weakness was his obsession on “indigenous”
development.
But the argument that India’s missiles are “indigenous” and Pakistan’s are based on Chinese, American, North Korean or someone else’s technology is a meaningless one. Military acquisitions are not about the “purity” of solutions, but time-urgent answers to a problem. And who will deny that Pakistan has got more than enough “solutions” in the nuclear weapon delivery area, to any threat India can offer?
So the issue thrown up by K. Santhanam is not about undermining Manmohan Singh’s foreign policy or questioning the “achievements” of our infallible scientists. It is not about “belief”, but the “validation” of a scientific/technical event on which the country’s nuclear deterrent is based. If there are doubts about the event, they cannot be addressed by shooting the messenger, but by a scientific process, maybe by a commission of unimpeachable scientists.
Of course, there is always the option of saying that we don’t really need a thermonuclear weapon; after all, even Pakistan doesn’t claim to have one.
This was published first in Mail Today September 2, 2009