A quick post before running for next round of business busyness.
ramana wrote:Arun_S, Now that you have some insight into POKI do you see the constraints on Mrs G after 1974? The whole decade is now cast in a different light.
A very pertinent question. India had just emerged victorious in 1971 war, having dismembered Pakistan, making it a non-issue (those years it was thought Pakistan is now off Indian problem chart for ever. Sadly the international layer that created Pakistan in first place, saw a need to give birth to it again and Pakistan reemerged as Phoenix, this time much stronger psy-op to make it Equal Equal with India with all teh air being filled by its step-father in Anglo Saxon world, boxing above its weight)
That was also a time Mrs G knew that integrity of India was now unassailable (I.N.Congress and Mrs G understood the bigger game-plan of the devil for India to disintegrate when Flag was first raised on Red Fort in the Tryst with Destiny). With the foot in door to be in reckoning of Nuclear Weapon State, she knew that India will have time later to build a more credible weapon when needed at a later stage.
Mrs G had serious condition that time with badly faltering economy, very bad food grain situation, and of course at personal front the Allahabad High Court decision. Delaying the next round of N test to perfect and prove it was not high in perato. Yet there was no doubt that when time comes it can and will be exercised. During her second term the resurgent India pendulum was fast turning in other direction, and she was not longer as free in exercising Indian will, the US+ U combo was fast closing the net on India to show India its right place per AngloSaxon game plan. Little gain here and there was more important than testing (she was close to testing 2 times, before her assassination).
As it turned out the DAE team failed the nation again when GOI gave them all that is needed to make it happen. And the GOI that gave it all resources to make it happen was not just NDA under BJP, but more importantly, Mrs.G on her second term, Rajeev Gandhi, Shri PVN Rao, and Deva Gowda).
The Indian military gave DAE full support sacrificing a finger and a limb (human as well as budgetary) so that DAE get all that is required to deliver the goods. But when the moment of reckoning came GOI under ABV gave one last chance to do all tests necessary to their hearts content. DAE faltered again and did not deliver promised goods. ABV tried to cover up failure of DAE (I am still amazed at why the 6th sub-kt test was cancelled!. Thanks to lucky stars of India that of the 3 sub-kt experiments, one of them gave them perfect set of data, other other experiments were evidently poorly designed. Again I say organization flaws of lack of peer review, process and inbreeding/nepotism.
ramdas wrote:Arunji,
The way I see the picture is as follows.
POK-I did not yield what it was expected to. Most probably due to manufacturing deficiencies.
No.
It failed because it was a a Jugaad design. not following scientific methods and processes.
I was shocked to see evidence of the kind of jugaad they did. For example because the Pu core was getting too hot (due to heat of radio active decay), our wizard Dr Anil Kakodkar came up with the ingenious "Jugaaad" of putting a ring of copper around the core (like rings of planet Saturn) to take the heat away, and no one see any problem with that or objected. WOP Page 195:
On 13 May, Soni Kakodkar, Iyengar, Venkatesan and Balakrishnan got down to assembling the device. They had shipped a wooden model of the device to guide them and constantly refrring to it. Apart from the desert heat, there was the more worrying problem of the plutonium sphere overheating teh device. Kakodkar had designed a copper disc that surrounded the plutonium sphere like the rings of Saturn to dessipate the heat being generated by its neutron activity.
Dispite the precautions, the team apparently had not calculated for the extreme weather conditions. The metal components in the device had expanded ever so slightly on the first day and they wouldn't fit snugly when the scientists tried to assemble them despite several attempts. In utter exhaustion by the night they gave up the effort. Soni had always regarded number 13 as the omen of bad luck and now his superstition was coming true.
One does not have to be a nuclear scientist to figure out the need for what disrupts uniform compression of implosion weapon. Symmetry and uniformity of course.
Too hard to understand for the plumber.
Got to run for meeting.