Place · nuclear test site & town · India
Pokhran
Also known as Pokhran, Pokaran, Smiling Buddha, Operation Shakti, Pokhran-I, Pokhran-II
The Rajasthan desert test site 110 kilometres from Jaisalmer where India conducted its 1974 Smiling Buddha nuclear test — the first by a non-Permanent Member of the UN Security Council — and the 1998 Pokhran-II series of five tests that made India a declared nuclear-weapons state. The 1974 device, assembled at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay from plutonium produced in the Cirus reactor, yielded about eight kilotons at Shakti-I site. The 1998 Operation Shakti under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee tested a fusion-boosted device and four fission devices across 11 and 13 May; A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as scientific adviser oversaw the tests from the site. The nuclear tests have made Pokhran one of the most consequential places in the subcontinent's postwar history.
- Date
- 1974–1998
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Tradition
- DRDO and BARC institutional histories; A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire; Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.920, 71.920
Worth knowing
The 1974 test was announced as a peaceful nuclear explosion and codenamed Smiling Buddha because the message was sent on Buddha Purnima; the 1998 series was called Shakti. Ramdevra, one of the largest pilgrimages in western India, is twelve kilometres from the range, so the same stretch of desert carries a saint's tomb and a test site.
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyRamdevra
Ramdevra and the Pokhran range are twelve kilometres apart in the open Thar. One is the tomb of a fifteenth-century Rajput saint venerated by Hindus and Muslims and attended above all by Dalit pilgrims, drawing more than a million people on foot; the other is where India tested nuclear devices in 1974 and 1998. The same emptiness recommended both.
- Site adjacencyTanot Mata, Jaisalmer
Tanot Mata is administered by the Border Security Force and Pokhran is a nuclear test range, and both are in the same stretch of empty desert for the same reason: a frontier was drawn across it in 1947 and the space behind the frontier was useful. A goddess shrine maintained by paramilitaries and a test site are what the Thar's twentieth century produced.
- AnalogueChagai / Rās Koh
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.
- Oversaw atA. P. J. Abdul Kalam
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam oversaw the Pokhran-II nuclear tests of 11 and 13 May 1998 as scientific adviser to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee — the five test devices that made India a declared nuclear-weapons state, after the 1974 Smiling Buddha test had opened the capability. Operation Shakti was conducted with such operational secrecy that American satellite surveillance missed the construction phase entirely; Kalam and the testers worked in groups of five, moved between sites in army uniform, and had the devices in position before the Americans realised what was happening.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pokhran”. Department of Atomic Energy statements of May 1974 and May 1998; Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace (2000); Rajasthan District Gazetteer, Jaisalmer.
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