Posted on 12/27/2004 1:00:15 AM PST by CarrotAndStick
New Delhi, Dec. 23: Former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who died this afternoon, has carried one of India’s best kept military secrets to the grave.
Unless the late Prime Minister has left behind records that are yet to be unearthed, it will never be known why he backed out from carrying out nuclear tests in December 1995 after authorising a review of India’s nuclear policy. It was Rao’s groundwork that was subsequently used by the BJP-led government of Vajpayee to push through a nuclear weaponisation programme in May 1998.
In different interviews and in accounts by strategic experts, Rao himself let it be known that India had planned nuclear tests in his regime but then he pulled back from the brink. In an interview early this year, he said the reason he did not go through with the test will be a secret he will carry to his deathbed.
George Perkovich, author of India’s Nuclear Bomb (Oxford University Press), wrote that Rao had “explicitly authorised preparatory work for nuclear tests, and perhaps even emplacement of devices in test shafts, without a firm decision actually to proceed to detonation of weapons”.
On December 15, 1995, The New York Times reported that India was going ahead with nuclear tests. Three days later, Pranab Mukherjee, then external affairs minister in the Narasimha Rao cabinet, said India would not conduct nuclear tests, allaying US fears.
India’s own scientists with the Defence Research and Development Organisation wanted Rao to authorise the test. A former head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission also said dates for the tests were fixed.
Other accounts say then US President Bill Clinton telephoned Rao and warned him against the tests. US intelligence had reportedly procured photographs of preparations for the tests in Pokhran and had confronted Rao with them. Rao had said most accounts of the events were imprecise but he never clarified where they had gone wrong.
From the preparations for the May 1998 tests, it was clear that the BJP government had taken a good lesson from the events of 1995 and 1996.
When the 1998 tests were conducted, the preparations were masked and shielded from US spy satellites. When the “Buddha Smiled” on May 11 and May 13 that year with five underground explosions, the Vajpayee government scaled a peak of popularity within the country despite being reprimanded internationally and sparking off a race in the subcontinent.
Even then, the Congress claimed that it was the Rao government that had actually prepared for the tests and the BJP was simply capitalising on its work. What held back Rao? It may never probably be known.
There are reports of yesterday's tsunami having caused damage to a nuclear reactor in India, but it was shut down much earlier.
-The India-Pakistani Conflict... some background information- --
The Kalpakkam plant is said to be safe.Some seawater did get into the facility(but not anywhere near the reactors).It was shut down almost immediately.SriHarikota is also safe.
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