Place · nuclear test site · Pakistan
Chagai / Rās Koh
Also known as Chagai / Rās Koh — the 1998 tests
Pakistan tested nuclear weapons inside a granite mountain of the Rās Koh range in the Chagai desert on 28 May 1998, firing five devices in a tunnel complex, and a sixth at Kharan two days later. The date is kept as Youm-e-Takbir. The tests were a direct answer to India's Pokhran-II on 11 and 13 May, seventeen days earlier, and they ended the era in which both states' capabilities were officially deniable.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 28.791, 64.947
Worth knowing
The Rās Koh tunnels had been bored and kept ready since the 1980s, so the seventeen-day gap between Pokhran and Chagai measured the political decision rather than the engineering.
Yields for both the Indian and Pakistani May 1998 tests are disputed; seismic estimates are consistently lower than the official figures on both sides.
Connections (2)
- AnaloguePokhran
Seventeen days apart, and the second was an answer to the first. India tested at Pokhran in the Thar on 11 and 13 May 1998, the second series at a site it had used once before in 1974. Pakistan answered from tunnels bored into a granite mountain of the Rās Koh in the Chagai desert on 28 May, and again at Kharan on the 30th. Both governments had held the capability without declaring it for years; three weeks in May 1998 ended that, and the two deserts on either side of the Thar are where it happened.
- Imperial administration ofKalāt
The tests were conducted on Baloch ground by a state the Khanate acceded to in 1948, and that is the substance of a continuing grievance. Chagai and Kharan lie in the territory the Ahmadzai Khans ruled from Kalat, and the tunnels were bored and the devices fired without any process that consulted the province. Baloch nationalist argument treats 28 May 1998 as an act performed on Balochistan rather than by Pakistan, and the environmental and health record of the site has never been independently published.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chagai-I” and “Pokhran-II”. Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization seismic data; Feroz Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (2012).
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