On the 138th day of the year 1974, at 8 hours 08 minutes and 20 seconds in the morning, local time, India surprised the world by carrying out its first nuclear explosion.
His code name was “Smiling Buddha.”
“They didn’t expect us to have the capacity,” Dr. Satinder Kumar Sikka recalled in conversation with the BBC in 2018.
“When we did it, everyone had to open their eyes to our science and technology.”
In 1969, Sikka was a young scientist employed at India’s main nuclear research centre, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, near Bombay.
He was completing his PhD under the supervision of one of the country’s leading nuclear scientists, Dr Rajagopala Chidambaram.
What I didn’t know was that His supervisor had been recruited for a secret project by one of the main directors of the center, dr. Raja Ramanna, a man who would become a central figure in India’s nuclear weapons program.
“I was preparing my PhD thesis in my room and I got a call from Dr Ramanna’s office to come and see him, and Dr Chidambaram was there.
“Dr Ramanna told me: ‘Sikka, you’ve already done enough for yourself. So now you have to do something for the country’.
“Then he told me: ‘You are going to participate in a project for a peaceful nuclear explosion.’
“I was the second or third person to be included in that project.”
In other words
As Sikka said, the goal was to make a “peaceful nuclear explosion” or PNE, a terminology for a nuclear explosion for non-military purposes… although that could often simply mean that the device had not been miniaturized to be a viable weapon.
Either way, everyone knew that, in essence, it was an atomic bomb.
“The atomic nucleus is a bomb,” stressed the nuclear condensed matter physicist.
“When the Soviets and Americans carried out ENP tests they were actually testing their weapons. ENP was just an excuse.”
India had been carrying out nuclear research since the 1940s.
It had refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but its leaders publicly maintained that the country was only interested in a peaceful nuclear energy program.
For this they had received help from Western nations.
But following China’s successful nuclear bomb test in 1964 (two years after the Sino-Indian War), and amid rising tensions with Pakistan, India had initiated secret plans to develop its own atomic bomb.
The main objective was to establish a deterrent capability against potential adversaries and safeguard national security interests.
The project was led by civilians, and secrecy was paramount.
Of the 10,000 employees at the Atomic Research Center, fewer than 100 participated in the plan, and even those recruited often did not know who else was involved or what they were working on.
“We didn’t have to tell anyone when we had review meetings, no notes were kept, so there was no risk of leaks.
“In addition, everything worked on the basis that access to information was restricted to what was strictly necessary.
“So we kept everything very hidden… but my wife guessed that I was doing a secret job“.
A great scientific challenge
The project leaders decided to make a plutonium device using fuel from a civilian nuclear research reactor, which had been built with help from Canada, although, of course, without telling the Canadians.
The device would be similar to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki during world war II.
“It was an implosion device.
“The atomic nucleus was spherical and was surrounded by chemical explosives.
“When shock waves of chemical explosives are applied simultaneously on all sides, the atomic nucleus is compressed and, at the point of supercriticality, a neutron is introduced, starting a chain reaction.
“The chain reaction grows and leads to the explosion and the release of energy. “This is how the implosion device works.”
However, building it was not easy, especially because the other nuclear powers were not going to share their secrets with India.
“We were the only country that was doing it without receiving help from abroad.
“At that moment, very little was known except some basic principles. So we had to develop everything from scratch.”
The list of complex scientific challenges was enormous, including the creation of the atomic nucleus.
“Plutonium is a very toxic substance. The physical properties are very exotic. At room temperature and room pressure it is very fragile and difficult to handle for manufacturing spheres and components.
“Another thing was that we were denied supercomputers or even basic computers. So we had to make do with very rudimentary computing devices.”
However, by 1972, they had a working device, which they continued to perfect for the next two years.
A test site was chosen in Pokhran, in the sweltering desert of northern India, 150 kilometers from Pakistan.
The test was not going to be carried out on the surface, so they dug a special pit deep underground, and placed the large device there.
“They lowered it into the well two days before the explosion, and filled the hole with debris, sand and other things.
“It wasn’t possible to make last-minute changes, so we were obviously nervous.
“Just one hour before the test, we evacuated people from the surrounding villages.
“They’re smart people, so they probably suspected something big was going to happen.”
Buddha smiled
The test was scheduled for May 18, 1974.
Dr. Sikka and his colleagues gathered to observe it from a tower four kilometers away.
“They gave us a notebook with a pen so we could record what was going to happen, but everything happened in a flash and in a millisecond.
“When the device exploded, we saw that the ground swelled, rising like a mound up to about 34 meters, which then lowered, and we felt earthquake-like phenomena.
“We immediately knew that our effort had been successful and there was a lot of excitement, applause and all that. I was very young at that time. “I jumped from the top of the tower to the landing below.”
The news of the success of the test was immediately sent to Delhi.
“That May 18 was Buddha’s birthday, so the code name between the Prime Minister’s office and our president, dr. Ramanna, was “Smiling Buddha”.
“When the explosion was successful, there was a direct line to Delhi and they said Buddha had smiled“.
And then the scientists celebrated.
“We all got together on the military bus and had a great party. It was summer and there were a lot of mangoes and a lot of beer.”
When news of the test became known, although some countries recognized the country’s right to defend itself, there were international outrage against India for breaking the de facto global moratorium on nuclear testing.
International nuclear cooperation with India was suspended, which had serious repercussions on the country’s civil nuclear program.
“Yes, it was a shock. “They did not expect Indian science and technology to be so advanced that they could carry out a nuclear test.”
Over the next two decades, India miniaturized its device and created a viable bomb, and Pakistan rushed to build one as well.
After a gap of 24 years, India carried out another series of five underground nuclear explosions on May 11 and 13, 1998, drawing criticism from many countries around the world.
Sikka, who died in 2023, successfully led work to develop a much more powerful thermonuclear device, and was Scientific Secretary to the Principal Scientific Advisor to the government of India.
When he spoke to the BBC four and a half decades after the “Smiling Buddha” test, he had no qualms about his role in helping turn India into a nuclear power.
“No, we don’t regret it. In fact, we feel proud to have achieved what we wanted and to have done something for the country“.
* If you want to listen to BBC Witness History’s “Smiling Buddha: India’s First Nuclear Test”, Click here.
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