Deterrence

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vsunder
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

@Ramana As I said before the Chinese were beyond Operation Sandstone and at Operation Ranger in their first test. The third series. And in that series the Baker test was below critical, fractional critical. Clever use of "air gap" made the fissile material supercritical. So instead of a 20 year headstart(which they would have been if the Chinese test was a Hiroshima device), the US suddenly realized that were just a decade ahead of the Chinese. The tests for Ranger series 1951 were designated Able, Baker, Charlie etc. The Urchin initiator of the 1945 devices was replaced by something more sophisticated in the Ranger series, in addition to conserving fissile material by a more innovative explosive charge configuration.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by srin »

RoyG wrote:
Varoon Shekhar wrote:Right. Is it safe to say, though, that the boosted fission trigger of the thermonuclear device worked very well, flawlessly? There are knowledgeable commentators who are certain that the S-1 fusion bomb fizzled( or even didn't ignite at all) but that the primary went off superbly
The consensus among the fizzle crowd is the fbf trigger worked but a design flaw prevented ignition of the tertiary.
Some info I can’t share but if you want to talk more you can email: mail for nrg @g ma il. Com
What is this info that is so sensitive that it can only be shared with US intel agencies that have in the past had access to Gmail accounts ?
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Re: Deterrence

Post by ShauryaT »

ramana wrote:[

* As my Mumbai friends say watch and "enjoy karne ka!"

ShauryaT, it is not China that will object.
A little more authentic Mumbaiya "Majaa karne ka!" :)

I am counting on China not objecting. China is a ruse. A ruse that sells in the corridors of Washington.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by RoyG »

srin wrote:
RoyG wrote:
The consensus among the fizzle crowd is the fbf trigger worked but a design flaw prevented ignition of the tertiary.
Some info I can’t share but if you want to talk more you can email: mail for nrg @g ma il. Com
What is this info that is so sensitive that it can only be shared with US intel agencies that have in the past had access to Gmail accounts ?
Nothing sensitive
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

1. First of all Santhanam nowhere said the test was a fizzle. In fact the Deccan Herald of Aug 27, 2009 clearly states for example as do other newspapers that Santhanam thought the yield of TN weapon was too low to fulfill the strategic needs of India. Thus Santhanam was advocating a test at the uppermost range of the design that was tested. That is all.

2. Secondly as my article on craters clearly demonstrates that the shaft of S-1 had a upper cap of 100kt. Past this there was the very real danger of the shaft venting and spewing out radioactive debris. This was a very real concern and the test was on hold for the better part of the day on May 11, waiting for winds to die and abate. The wait was particular tense for ABV and Fernandes. In particular the team at Pokaran did not want any westerly blowing winds which would carry radio-active debris if venting happened into Pakistan. If it did, all Pakistan would have to do is cry and and not test and the full force of sanctions would be felt on India which would be an international pariah. The scaling laws are very well understood by now both by BARC as in their Pramana papers by Ranga Rao from POK-1 and of course the pioneering work of Toman and Nordyke, so if you want to bloviate without reading all these articles which I have summarized as best as I could for a non-expert then it is your problem.

3. Santhanam is not an expert on weapons design and had no idea of the design or the scalability of the design. That is only known to the people at BARC. He was worried that India would sign the CTBT and said what he said that India should test a full proof test before signing the CTBT. This much was clear to all. The issue with India was simply that they had one chance to test a device in an Agni configured configuration, that is a canister that is of the dimensions and weight that could be carried on the delivery systems available at that time. Therefore the device was configured as such. It is not enough that you test a device in a certain configuration, but that device has to have a geometry that does fit the Agni vehicle and a weight that the Agni can carry. The early devices were way too heavy, remember Oppenheimer's famous quip to Edward Teller about the super " So Edward how are you going to transport the device, on an ox cart?". That was not the point of POK-2, make something that goes kaboom, that was easy, you want to package it in something that is deliverable since you wont get another chance and at the same time not vent sh***t in the air. It was a real worry.

4. The most precise way of measuring yield in decreasing order is as follows:

(a) Radiochemical analysis.

(b) Very close to (a)., by Corretex cables and hydrodynamic methods. See the article by F. K. Lamb referred to in the survey by D. Ramana, M. Thundyil, V. Sunder in BR Monitor. Read that paper. Corretex cables were part of the monitoring network at POK-II and would have given additional and precise validation instantly to what they would have done later, digging out core samples after the site had "cooled"down and then subjected the samples to radiochemical analysis say a month after the test.

(c) Crater size analysis and comparison with the huge amount of data released by the US under the PNE program, part of the data is displayed in my article. I wonder why forumers have to diss the general who actually dug the shafts when he says he was personally responsible for digging a shaft over 200m deep and that is corroborated separately by Chengappa. The general also indicates the type of soil that was encountered by the army team. It was wet and the Army had no idea what to do till a visit to the Zawar Zinc mines allowed them to see how pumps in mines work and allowed them to get these pumps. A wet environment does change the coupling as Toman and Nordyke clearly show in their graph. Chengappa also states the shafts had water leaking in them. The BARC insisted on a dry environment and the Army to humor them, served them tea in the L chamber in the bottom with dry carpet laid out vindicating the pumping solutions they found. Thus
my coupling constant is 75 from the 60 for hard, DRY granite in my article. The higher the coupling, the bigger the crater size for a given explosion. So 1 kt will produce a bigger crater if the coupling is higher. I say all this. The Scaling laws in the fundamental papers of Toman and Nordyke both highly respected scientists at Lawrence Livermore are very carefully presented in works released by the International Atomic Energy Commission IAEA and very carefully studied by me. The photos post the test and the scaling laws and yield are in complete agreement, if you have not understood my article that is another thing, but I suspect one has not read anything and bloviating is going on. Read the papers by Ranga Rao for POK-1 in Pramana too that I refer and Burton et al that I refer.

(d) The last method is the Seismic method. This is the least accurate. Here I can give you a whole course on Seismology that I learned to understand all this. I can assure you when I write notes on a topic, they are among the best. Here Rayleigh waves are the best waves to judge the yield. The waves like S and P waves that pass through the Earth's core traverse regions like the Mohoroviviv layer and speed up. You know from light that when light enters glass from air the light speed slows down and this is the origin of refraction. Different frequencies refract differently and that is the origin of the rainbow. Similar things happen when one of the discontinuities are crossed, different frequencies are refracted differently in the seismic waves and this means at the detector station depending on where it is at the opposite end of the source or differently, that is on the path taken, the detection will be affected by the path. Thus one cannot make an accurate assessment of the yield by using a few seismic stations. As the number of seismic stations was increased and data was taken from 125 + seismic stations, the yield for POK-II via S and P waves too matched the stated yields from BARC. So where is the problem? In fact
such an analysis using 125 stations was conducted by Prof. Roger Clark of Leeds university(see one such source K. Subramanyam's op-ed piece linked below, and many other places where Roger Clark's work was quoted) and again found to be in agreement with the stated yields of BARC.

To understand a bit Seismic waves are treated as propagating via a linear wave equation which is already a huge approximation to a complex phenomena of layered media, the Earth. The propagation in such media is surely nonlinear. The wave speed of a seismic wave may depend on the disturbance itself and that means immediately a nonlinear equation.
Now if u(x,y,z,t) denotes the displacement at position P(x,y,z) at time t, u is a vector one has a simple lemma of Helmholtz with a trivial proof that one can break up

u=A+B
where A is divergence free and B is curl free. The curl free part B gives rise to waves that are longitudinal , akin to Sound waves and these are the P waves. They travel fastest and are the first waves to reach a seismic station from an earthquake or underground explosion. The A part gives rise to Transverse waves something like how light propagates. They travel slower than the P waves. These are the S waves. It turns out that seismic events have a preponderance of S waves due to continental plates rubbing against each other. While explosions that are nuclear have a preponderance of P waves. Thus by noticing which of the S or P waves contribute greater to the signal energy one can decide if it was an earthquake or a nuclear explosion. So the oft repeated nonsense that you can fake an earthquake and pass off a nuclear explosion is just nonsense.

A part of the explosive signal reaches the surface of the Earth and there one can do an identical decomposition as stated above as transverse and longitudinal and so one gets longitudinal surface waves and transverse surface waves. Since these waves travel on the surface where no doubt it has to cross oceans and so on, the path and medium it encounters is considerably more uniform and so the estimation of yields is a bit more reliable than crossing various layers of the Earth's core. Jack Evernden a famous geologist utilized these surface waves to deduce that the yield of POK-II was as BARC had announced. There are other surface waves like the Love waves found by AEH Love who wrote a fundamental book on Linear Elasticity.

5. The doyen of Strategic thinkers in India K. Subramanyam the father of EAM Jaishankar, wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Tribune mentioning the work of the seismologist Jack Evernden and others like Roger Clark of Leeds university(see above)and stating very clearly the Armed Forces are happy with the results. Here:

https://m.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090903/edit.htm#6

So what is the controversy by people who neither understand the seismology, craterology nor have access to Radiochemical or Corretex data?

6. Lastly Santhanam from DRDO was superseeded by APJ Kalam who was the chief of DRDO at the test site. If the chief has not raised concerns that the test was a fizzle, then I am less inclined to take a report "Santhanam said it was a fizzle" seriously when he never said that.

Lastly here is the report of the Deccan Herald I started with, please point out where in this article it is stated that Santhanam employed the word fizzle? It is clear he is unhappy that the test was a low yield device, but as I point out there were limitations of the shaft, of the geometry of the device for a one shot test and the political repercussions for testing at full yield and a test that vents. A perfectly controlled and successful test is you design it for X kilotons and it is very close to X kilotons, how sure are you this will happen in a first test with a design that is unproven? What if there is a runaway test and it vents, SH***T would have happened and all the Pakis would have to do is cry all over and not do anything. They would easily trot out tons of people with real and imagined radiation burns. This is all India could do in the circumstance to meet so many constraints on the test. A test that is designed for X kilotons and yields X kilotons indicates you have mastered successfully the mechanics and predict accurately the yield for the design at different fissile material weights upto a certain threshold.

https://www.deccanherald.com/content/21 ... ran-n.html

This is a done and dusted topic. Tests are done by the establishment for security concerns not for the privilege of forumers to watch a July 4th fireworks display for NRIs or a Deepavali for those who reside in India. Then surely you know more than Subramaniam and others.
Last edited by vsunder on 07 Jun 2023 06:26, edited 6 times in total.
RoyG
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Re: Deterrence

Post by RoyG »

Do you have the Roger Clark analysis?
Last edited by ramana on 07 Jun 2023 09:12, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Edited by Ramana
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

Here is a better way to explain the problem with seismic data. Take white light. Interpose a prism and that prism does Fourier Analysis because it broke up the light into its constituent frequencies. Now you put a piece of paper and you are an ant, a seismic station and you are the part where red light strikes you. So you say ah ha, here is the frequency of the wave that has come by, my seismometer had measured the amplitude of the wave and without thinking you integrate amplitude^2 over the narrow band of frequencies that hit you and say yield is such and such. But that is stupid because the ant in the violet region will chime in and do the same analysis and since violet is a higher frequency will announce a higher yield. Worse what if the coupling at the test site allowed more of the violet to pass than the red. Then the announced yield by the ant at the red station is even worse off the mark than the violet ant. Worse seismologists average the yields. Why Fourier analysis tells us that energy is amplitude^2 integrated or summed over frequencies. So what is this average, it is stupid, but this is what they do, has no justification. I mean it is against a basic theorem in Fourier analysis. But this is the sort of crap that goes on.

The coupling of the explosion to the surrounding medium, what path the wave takes from the site of explosion to the detecting seismic station, since the path will cross several times various discontinuities like Mohorovicic discontinuity, Guetenberg discontinuity, Repetti discontinuity where seismic waves slow down or speed up, and cause dispersion of the wave just like light entering a medium from another medium all cause dispersion all have a role to play in determining yield. There is no formula that seismologists have for yield vs signal they receive based on first principles, its all inexact. Much is known about the structure of the Earth and much not known, local anomalies may exist along paths that may attenuate certain frequencies, they do not know everything. Yield estimation given the way I have presented it is recovering the Fourier transform back and recovering the energy of the wave from the amplitudes and frequencies PROVIDED you have the FULL SIGNAL, then even one seismic station will even do. But if you have been following my red ant, green ant and blue ant analogy, no one seismic station or even 10 stations will capture all frequencies and all amplitudes and allow you to produce the original wave form due to attenuation which decreases amplitude and dispersion that only allows a certain band of signals to pass by your detector or a a whole signal but with amplitudes that are not the same as the true wave.

So if you say my analysis is based on 10 stations it means jack because nobody knows the dispersion pattern fully and can say what path from Pokharan to the seismic station what frequencies got dispersed and not picked up, you may be the green ant for example and all the coupling was in blue and no seismic station in your list of 10 picked up all the blue. So more the stations the better the prediction as you have a better chance of picking all the frequencies etc. Even then some stations are farther from the test site than others and so attenuation will happen, so what correction will you use? It is empirical based on a large set of experiments, you would want a large number of explosions at Pokharan and calibrate with a precise yield. This the US has done with a number of its shots, but that does not mean such attenuation "laws" apply to the path from Pokharan to YKA(Seismic Station Yellowknife in Canada) for example, as it applied from Nevada to YKA. ..........
Last edited by vsunder on 07 Jun 2023 06:12, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by ramana »

RoyG You don't have to quote the whole post to ask a question. And you can look for it.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

The last point I wanted to add in my tutorial on Seismology is this: If you have ever solved the linear wave equation in n dimensions from a point source like an explosion, remember the formula for the solution is (r is the distance to the source)

1/ r^{(n-1)/2} times some exponential oscillatory factor that need not concern us here.

This formula shows in dimension 3(n=3), the wave attenuates as 1/r and in dimension TWO (n=2)it attenuates as 1/ sqrt(r), 1/r^{1/2}. AHA, if you have been following me so far notice for the S and P waves that are travelling in 3 dimension the attenuation is 1/distance to the source, but for the surface waves like Rayleigh waves that travel on the surface of the Earth hence in 2 DIMENSIONS the attenuation is MUCH LESS 1/ r^{1/2}. So you see why Evernden advocates Rayleigh waves as a better source to determine yield as the attenuation is MUCH LESS.

PS: To the cognoscenti, the oscillatory factor is what are called Hankel functions which are a type of Bessel functions, I just used their asymptotic behavior and that is enough for my purpose to explain why Rayleigh waves are better to estimate yield as they attenuate less than waves that travel through the Earth's core like S and P waves.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by sanjaykumar »

As long as the signal is reliably detectable and intensity calibrated to source energy, why would degree of attenuation matter?

In other words one has devised a ruler, now go measure.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by pravula »

There is no ruler if I understood it correctly.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by ramana »

vsunder's lecture tells us seismic waves are a qualitative signature only.
Using them for yield estimates is fraught with errors.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

@RoyG This is an article written by Trevor Findlay to which Professor Roger Clark contributed as stated in the article. Note the article states that initially the Pokharan test was assigned a body wave magnitude of 4.7 (body wave means via S and P waves, see my tutorial) and then after more stations were added the body wave magnitude was upped to 5.2 and this was consistent with the announced yields of BARC. Further note that surface Rayleigh wave magnitude of 3.6. That is 8 days after the event when data from 125 stations was included and then a fresh body wave magnitude was assigned.

All of you stop spreading f*** ng nonsense about stuff you have zero knowledge, do not know zilch about but spew pindi channa gas here. Its done go home and go spread gas on US India thread.


https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/129753/TV80.pdf

Read the whole article carefully. Indians have a habit of mouthing off thinking they know everything without reading jack.

{Dunning Kruger effect. Ramana}

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... ndplnj0oVh

In fact the article is very clear. The USGS(United States Geological Survey) itself added those 125 stations and came up with the new body wave magnitude of 5.2. So what is the effing takleef some of you have?
Last edited by ramana on 07 Jun 2023 21:50, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Edited by ramana.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

Let me finish by giving a tight jhapad to all the sootiyas all over. When the 4.7 value on the "Richter" scale or mb scale was announced a value of 20kt was assigned to the Pokaran explosion initially, see article above and Wallace and company(for Wallace reference see the BRM article with Ramana and Thundyil). 8 days later after bringing in data from 125 stations the value of 5.2 was assigned by USGS(United States Geological Survey). This means the increase is 0.5. Now all yea listen, seismic magnitudes are computed LOGARITHMICALLY TO BASE 10. So the fact that the increase is 0.5 means that the new yield is 10^{0.5}=square root of 10 = roughly 3 times the old yield which is

3 x20=60 kilotons =45+15 exactly what BARC said.


I am doing sootiyas a service by telling you all this because I am 100% sure you CANNOT compute even high school level stuff. Also always remember when asking something from someone use the magic words PLEASE and end by THANK YOU, did not your mummy teach you that?
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Anurag »

vsunder wrote:Let me finish by giving a tight jhapad to all the sootiyas all over. When the 4.7 value on the "Richter" scale or mb scale was announced a value of 20kt was assigned to the Pokaran explosion initially, see article above and Wallace and company(for Wallace reference see the BRM article with Ramana and Thundyil). 8 days later after bringing in data from 125 stations the value of 5.2 was assigned by USGS(United States Geological Survey). This means the increase is 0.5. Now all yea listen, seismic magnitudes are computed LOGARITHMICALLY TO BASE 10. So the fact that the increase is 0.5 means that the new yield is 10^{0.5}=square root of 10 = roughly 3 times the old yield which is

3 x20=60 kilotons =45+15 exactly what BARC said.


I am doing sootiyas a service by telling you all this because I am 100% sure you CANNOT compute even high school level stuff. Also always remember when asking something from someone use the magic words PLEASE and end by THANK YOU, did not your mummy teach you that?
:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :lol:
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Varoon Shekhar »

Thanks for that excellent, detailed info, V.Sunder.

When the big uproar about the 'failure' of the Indian tests was announced in the fall of 2009, one of the absolute worst( if not the worst) reporter of this news was the Globe and Mail of Canada. The article basically said that the nuclear tests totally failed, making it look like all 5 tests were duds. They didn't even clarify that the only 'question' at all, was the full, unabashed success of the thermonuclear device, and the satisfaction among the scientists thereof. And they had an Indian/Indian origin writer by the name of Rao, who went even further to suggest that now that the total failure is known, India should abandon all thoughts of nuclear weapons development, and concentrate entirely on lifting people out of poverty. Incredible.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by RoyG »

vsunder wrote:@RoyG This is an article written by Trevor Findlay to which Professor Roger Clark contributed as stated in the article. Note the article states that initially the Pokharan test was assigned a body wave magnitude of 4.7 (body wave means via S and P waves, see my tutorial) and then after more stations were added the body wave magnitude was upped to 5.2 and this was consistent with the announced yields of BARC. Further note that surface Rayleigh wave magnitude of 3.6. That is 8 days after the event when data from 125 stations was included and then a fresh body wave magnitude was assigned.

All of you stop spreading f*** ng nonsense about stuff you have zero knowledge, do not know zilch about but spew pindi channa gas here. Its done go home and go spread gas on US India thread.


https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/129753/TV80.pdf

Read the whole article carefully. Indians have a habit of mouthing off thinking they know everything without reading jack.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... ndplnj0oVh

In fact the article is very clear. The USGS(United States Geological Survey) itself added those 125 stations and came up with the new body wave magnitude of 5.2. So what is the effing takleef some of you have?
Well put together analysis and links. Thank you for taking the time for making knowledge behind seismic waves accessible to those without good physics background.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by ramana »

With this no more discussion.

BTW Galwan stayed local because S-1 worked.
IOW escalation ladder stayed true.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Cyrano »

Varoon Shekhar wrote:Thanks for that excellent, detailed info, V.Sunder.

When the big uproar about the 'failure' of the Indian tests was announced in the fall of 2009, one of the absolute worst( if not the worst) reporter of this news was the Globe and Mail of Canada. The article basically said that the nuclear tests totally failed, making it look like all 5 tests were duds. They didn't even clarify that the only 'question' at all, was the full, unabashed success of the thermonuclear device, and the satisfaction among the scientists thereof. And they had an Indian/Indian origin writer by the name of Rao, who went even further to suggest that now that the total failure is known, India should abandon all thoughts of nuclear weapons development, and concentrate entirely on lifting people out of poverty. Incredible.
If our tests were really complete fizzles, why would these countries bother at all ? Their stupid reactions are themselves a give away that their bowel movements have been seismically disrupted on a logarithmic scale :rotfl:
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Re: Deterrence

Post by RoyG »

ramana wrote:With this no more discussion.

BTW Galwan stayed local because S-1 worked.
IOW escalation ladder stayed true.
Nuclear capability generally does this. Not limited to TN.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

Some points:

P waves travel with a speed square root {3} faster than S waves. Read my tutorial.

J.F. Evernden's paper on Rayleigh waves and POK-2 is indeed in the journal

Physics and Society volume 27, 1998, pages 10-11.

My recollection was correct.

Surface waves and in particular L_g waves which are the higher mode surface waves are isotropic so less influenced by path. L_g waves are local though and seen within 2000km from the event. So seismic stations have to be close by in country for example. A formula by Murphy et al that links yield Y and M_s, strength of surface waves/Rayleigh waves


M_s=2.14+0.84 log Y where Y is the yield. log is to the base 10. Y=10^{1.738} if you do the calculation.

Using this formula and the value of M_s that of Rayleigh waves that was 3.6 for POK-2(see for example this value in the article by Trevor Findlay and Roger Clark linked above) , yield at Pokharan comes to 49kt. Instead using the formula in the paper by Evernden and Marsh referred to in the Ramana, Thundyil, Sunder summary one gets 52 kt for the yield. The Evernden-Marsh paper reference is again for the convenience of people:

J. F. Evernden, G. E. Marsh, Physics Today, August 1987, pages 37-44.


There is a lot more but as Ramana says time to quit. As they say opinions are like ar***holes everyone has one, so I suppose you are entitled to one on the yield. On this forum there are unique animals, with multiple a***seholes from where gas is emitted in profuse quantities all the time in multiple threads from those multiple holes, more power to you :rotfl:

The reference to the formula of Murphy and his paper with co-authors is

Murphy, J. R., Barker, B. W. and O’Donnell, A., Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, volume 79, 1989, 141–156.


Also striking is the fact that post the tests, I saw many, many papers by Sikka the TN design team chief, Phalguni Kar, GJ Nair, Chidambaram and Kakodkar(who I presume signed onto the papers that he endorses them being head of the BARC) I did not see till today a single paper on any aspect of the test by Santhanam. While there were many, many papers in Current Science and other journals dealing with Seismic aspects of the test, reports on Radiochemical analysis and so on, not one paper carried the imprint of Santhanam. This is indeed troubling and leads me to believe he was completely clueless.

With this post I have completely given you an analysis of both Body waves(S and P waves) and Surface waves and both methods of analysis lead to the same value of the yield by more precise methods.
Last edited by vsunder on 09 Jun 2023 04:33, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Varoon Shekhar »

vsunder, one last( from me for absolute certain) point. A repeated observation/criticism that was made, was that the shaft for the S-1 test, was totally undamaged. The only effect( going by these critics) is that the concrete casing that had been used to seal the shaft, was blown off. And thereby proving, in their minds, that the thermonuclear test significantly underperformed. Their belief is that the shaft should have been totally destroyed if all that heat and power was unleashed. These critics do not appear to be convinced by depth of burial, specific type of rock in S-1 shaft and simultaneous detonation of 3 devices.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by RoyG »

<POOF>

Admin Note:
1) enough of fishing expeditions in this forum! You are the only one here claiming things about TN fizzle, french/ICF, S6 etc. And no one need to answer your questions based on your own claims

2) as ramana has pointed out, no more quoting entire posts for one-liners
Last edited by hnair on 09 Jun 2023 01:45, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Warning issued
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Re: Deterrence

Post by RoyG »

RoyG wrote:<POOF>

Admin Note:
1) enough of fishing expeditions in this forum! You are the only one here claiming things about TN fizzle, french/ICF, S6 etc. And no one need to answer your questions based on your own claims

2) as ramana has pointed out, no more quoting entire posts for one-liners
Hnair,

There are others who have posted as well. You can withdraw the warning. Thanks.
Last edited by hnair on 09 Jun 2023 03:43, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Second warning issued and automatic 7-day ban
hnair
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Re: Deterrence

Post by hnair »

RoyG, stop ordering admins around. And stop quoting full posts
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

There was no S-6 and all this is total nonsense spread by dumb fcks. Let me explain. First the general who dug those shafts never mentions that he dug two shafts, just one. So where is the additional shaft to test another device. Secondly on May 11th, there was a simultaneous detonation of the two devices WHY? Because if you detonate one and then another after a while, there is the real danger you may damage one device due to the shock waves from one or the other. Plutonium spheres have to be perfect, explosive charges have to symmetrical for unform compression. If there is some mechanical damage that all goes out of the window. Thus both devices were detonated simultaneously so shock waves from the other do not damage the device. TN devices proceed by compression via Radiation in the secondary, that means the compression is being done at the speed of light, while shock waves travel at the speed of sound far, far slower check your high school Physics textbook and you will see how fast. So there is no worry that one of the devices will disassemble once detonated simultaneously. The shock waves from one will reach far after the nuclear reactions have set in amd are completed. You people spend too much time imbibing sh**t in the Physics and Math thread on this forum because it is all SH***T there. Spend time in isolation and prove some hard theorems that is the way to learn mathematics not through internet personalities, or read my excellent notes :rotfl: :lol:

You people expect me to believe a sixth device was buried in a deep imaginary shaft dug by an imaginary field unit that then is kept there banged by all sorts of shock waves from the first set of explosions May 11 and possibly warping the perfect sphere of a machined Plutonium core and wrecking the device. What dumb fck ch***ya logic is that? After that it was not used and they had to what drill through set concrete to recover an unexploded device, try recovering an unexploded regular bomb and you want a team to recover an unexploded nuclear bum. CH****YAS abound in this forum as I have said. What if all the hammering etc to break the concrete had made the bum go off as a dirty bum spewing just radiation around? Ever thought of that?

Next the responsibility of Santhanam was TEST SITE PREPARATION DIRECTOR. He was not even in charge of cabling, and getting the instrumentation and sensors ready which was directly under Govindraj of BARC. That is running camera cables, Corretex wires
and other sensors that allow one to compute the yield was directly under Govindraj, so even in that area Santhanam had no real say in the matter and so was ignorant of data from the instrumentation. Here is the wiki page with the official responsibilities of the team and verifying all that I have written in this paragraph:

Dr. G. Govindraj, Associate Director of Electronic and Instrumentation Group; Director, Field Instrumentation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II

Lastly as the wiki says Govindraj reported to BARC(since he was from the Instrumentation Group BARC), NOT DRDO, so the data would be given for analysis to BARC, so DRDO and Santhanam did not get to see any data. You need competent people to understand and process this data. What division of DRDO specializes in this analysis, let me know anybody on this forum?

@Varoon Shekhar, I have told you REPEATEDLY READ MY CRATER ARTICLE ON BRM. on cratering. You have not read jack there and come here mouthing nonsense, If you have friends who knew better then ask them. What really happened was that Santhanam put a big condom on S1 (the cover you are talking about) and that blew off and landed at NIL, that is the Paxitani seismic station at Nilore which was not fully working that day, then the Paxitani's sent the condom to AQ KAWN Labs for further analysis, then you know more than me along with AQ KAWN and so then be happy, why ask in open forum? That is then the answer. What is undamaged shaft in your post? No explosion then what was 58kt that day? Nothing works in Paxitan any day and so NIL not functioning May 11, 1998 is hardly surprising. Like the code for the station at Nilore NIL=ZERO, such an apt code name for a seismic station in a zero country.

Lastly the wikipedia link ^^^^ displays the same picture as the picture in Chengappa's book of the S1, TN device. Notice the canister and shape, that is configured to be mounted on the Agni as I have trying to beat into everyone's head, that was the point of the test too, not just a device but configured to be mounted on a delivery vehicle.

If some of you are smart(??) you will take that picture of S1 and the people nearby as a size scale and figure out a rough dimension of the bum. Now compare the size with the early humongous sized TN bums. Now go back to what Chidambaram and company said then, the designs " are vintage 1998" as Chidambaram exactly said. Now you understand akkal aya?
Last edited by vsunder on 11 Jun 2023 06:28, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by vsunder »

The non-isotropy of the Earth and the media is quite profound. For the POK-2 test of May 11, seismic station BHPL Bhopal, recorded non-attenuated surface waves, but the seismic station at Ajmer AJMR recorded attenuated seismic surface waves. I asked Sikka about it, that Ajmer was close to the test site yet the signal was attenuated. He seemed to think it was the Arravalli hills that played some effect in the attenuation.

India has 7 seismic zones and on page 2256 you can see a map of the seismic recording network in India which is very extensive.

https://seismo.gov.in/sites/default/fil ... RL_NSN.pdf

^^^ You can see Bhopal and Ajmer in the map. Gauribidanur(near Bangalore) which was run by TIFR and BARC thus a DAE seismic station at the time of POK-2 is not on the map as it does not come under CSIR. All were told a Paxitan test was imminent and so they were all primed to record a seismic event which was really POK-2, that was how secrecy was maintained and all in country detectors kept on high alert for POK-2 to record seismic data.

In the PDF document you see the seismograph from the earthquake at Kohima^^^. Note the peak when the sesimograph goes crazy is later in the seismograph as it is a natural one and lot of slow moving S waves. Now compare this of the N. Korean test seismograph below. Notice the sesimogram begins by going wild as nukes generate lots of P (longitudinal motion) body waves that travel sqrt {3} times faster. S waves come later and do not create that much wildness. The Kohima earthquake has most of its energy as S waves so that is how you can differentiate a nuke from a natural earthquake.

https://seismo.berkeley.edu/blog/2016/0 ... quake.html
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Cyrano »

vsunder garu, your posts are very informative and educative. So please dont degrade using vitriolic and cuss words.
Last edited by hnair on 12 Jun 2023 03:44, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Use report function, not act admin. Warning issued
Varoon Shekhar
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Varoon Shekhar »

For the record, it is not me that came up with the 'undamaged shaft= failure of S-1 device" :) It's people like this

https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinio ... 93465.html

Do I( we) want to believe him? Definitely not. But it would be nice to see these commentators strongly answered, so that when we encounter such questions, we have ready answers. Also for the intrinsic worth of seeing such arguments refuted. That's been done. Wonderful.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Tanaji »

^^^ What a strange article that begins with terming the device as dud and ends with calling it Gandhian. It relies on Weapons of peace book as the source which itself does not go that far in terming it as dud… No other proof is provided.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by ramana »

Can someone post the full text of that article and the following one on Kalam and the Gandhian Bomb?
Thanks in advance.
It needs refuting.

Cyrano, vsunder is addressing the readers also and not just the posters.
So let us give him room.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by ramana »

I went back and read a few of V Sudarshan's diatribes.
Seems to be first-class ChSO4.
Can ignore his vitriol.
Anyone who besmirches Kalam needs to be put in Yerragadda Mental Hospital.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Anujan »

The "Pokharan was a failure" was fueled by K Santhanam being vocal. I even recall Opeds by him. eg.

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/ ... 736892.ece

One should thank ABV for the courage of conducting the tests.

In a matter of 5 months 2 years prior (Sep 1995 - Jan 1996) france had conducted 6 tests, China conducted 5 and the goras had been outraged that Indians had the temerity to test.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by Roop »

ramana wrote:Can someone post the full text of that article and the following one on Kalam and the Gandhian Bomb? Thanks in advance.
Here is the text of Sudarshan's article:
The real Pokhran story
Dr R Chidambaram and his team stared an silent disbelief at the failure of the experiment.


The father of the dud thermonuclear bomb Dr R Chidambaram is on record describing how a real atomic explosion works. This description is recounted in Raj Chengappa’s engrossing book Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India’s Quest to be a Nuclear Power (Harper Collins, 2000) which provides a broad-brush overview of the development of both India’s nuclear and missile programmes. The author obviously had access to all the main players, the laboratories, which kind of makes it an almost official narrative. Chengappa who interviewed Chidambaram on June 10, 1998, writes (page 187): “Chidambaram’s eyes always light up when he describes what happens when an atom bomb is exploded deep underground. He says that under the intense heat of over a million degrees centigrade (emphasis mine) a mini-mountain of rock vaporises underground. And an equal amount melts… Meanwhile the shock waves of the blast strike the surface and cause a mini-mountain of sand to rise from the ground. The mound formed is called a retarc, the word crater spelt backwards. As the force of the explosion weakens in intensity the mound collapses inwards forming a giant crater.”

What basically happens is that the explosion vaporises material around it and then the vapours expand rapidly and push outwards in all directions creating shock waves that crushes more rock. “At the ‘Taj Mahal’ site (S1 where the fission device, weaponised for delivery through a missile exploded) the shockwaves from the blast lifted a giant mound of sand (page 430), the size of a hockey field (emphasis mine). DRDO’s colonel Umang Kapur who was flying high above in a helicopter to monitor the radioactivity and video film the event saw a plume of dust. As he neared he saw that the bunkers around the side had toppled like a pack of cards. Then, in awe, he watched a giant crater form as the sand poured down through a cylindrical chimney to fill up the cavity deep below the ground. …. On the ground the scientists suddenly felt the earth under their feet quake violently…. (They) ran out in time to see a giant wall of sand akin to a tidal wave rise and fall.”

At the White House site (S2 where the dud thermonuclear device was placed), if we are to go by what the scientists led Chengappa to believe, it was placed at a depth of 200 metres (page 427) in contrast to S1 which was about 50 metres less deep (at “over 150 metres”, page 422). This dud device was rated at 45 kt yield, three times the yield of the fission device in Taj Mahal shaft and was buried about 50 metres deeper, in a shaft a kilometre away. There is, however, good reason to believe that the shafts were not as deep as this since they had been in existence since 1981 and going by the accounts in the book were not deepened when readied for the 1998 tests; scientists familiar with the work say that the deeper shaft did not go as deep as 200 metres. A yield of one kiloton is the explosive energy equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. The bomb that US dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, only a third of the explosive energy the dud thermonuclear bomb allegedly set off.

At the bottom of the second shaft, a kilometre away, was the thermonuclear weapon. It had a fission-based trigger. The second stage was the fusion weapon. The shaft ran more than a 120 metres into the ground. At the bottom it veered slightly to the left, making an ‘L’. After the turn it ran for a further five metres, called an adit. The small tunnel was about six feet high, high enough for a person to stand. The width was about three metres. To get the men and materials into the shaft there was a winch that was suspended from an A Frame run by a diesel motor. The entire shaft was cased and shielded by a thin steel casing of .3 mm. This was to prevent or reduce seepage from subterranean streams that could mess up the wiring, among other things. Both S1 and S2 were old shafts, dug in 1981 when Rammana was adviser to defence minister. But they had been wired up from 1995 when Narasimha Rao was weighing the option of conducting nuclear tests. The three-year-old wiring had been in good working condition and the test team did not have to relay the cables, both for giving the command and for instrumentation, which was the responsibility of the DRDO, and not the BARC. For the 1998 tests, the shafts weren’t deepened or modified further.

The Control Room was about 2.5 km from ground zero. It was a tin shed with air conditioning and had all the instruments both for command cables and cables for instrumentation and recording. It was manned by working scientists and engineers of DRDO; the engineers were directly involved in instrumentation and recording process. Instrumentation within Pokhran was 100 per cent DRDO. Aviation Research Centre seismic instruments were outside Pokhran. The DAE had instrumentation in the shaft for Cortex which was a prototype. (It later transpired that the prototype Cortex failed to work). There were television cameras looking at ground zero, accelerometers, ground motion sensors, and a central recording place where the data stream was slipped. Instrumentation in 1998 was of a much higher order than 1974. This is undisputed.

After the explosion once the helicopter indicated there was no radioactivity in the air, the two teams Bravo (scientists from Bombay) and Delta (those from DRDO) went to inspect their work. According to Raj Chengappa, “The Taj Mahal site had a giant newly formed crater. But the Hydrogen bomb site wasn’t as impressive. A mound of several metres had risen and the sheds all around it had collapsed in a crazy heap. Some of the scientists looked worried. There was concern whether the secondary fusion device had properly detonated… That afternoon, however, Chidambaram and Sikka were confident. They told the rest that because the shaft was a very deep one and located on granite strata the impact on the surface was minimal. Reassured, the team headed back to break the news to the Prime Minister in Delhi.” (pages 431-432). The reconstruction of the final Pokhran moments in the book is based on author’s interviews with Chidambaram, S K Sikka, Anil Kakodkar, K Santhanam and Abdul Kalam.

According to one source who visited the site immediately after the test, apparently Chidambaram and the Bravo team stared in silent disbelief at the failure of the experiment. The blast had failed to even dislodge the winch and the A frame which stood in mute eloquent testimony to the failure. In the distance the scientists could see the yawning hole of the shaft grin mockingly at them. It had been a Gandhi bomb, totally non-violent.
I have to say, my impression is that this Sudarshan fellow (from the tone of the article) appears to be some kind of desi NPA, delighted that the test "failed" (in his opinion). This is pure malice, not a technical assessment.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by sum »

Does anyone actually have a copy of Weapons of Peace ( hardcopy or PDF)?

Have tried a ton all over but never been able to get hand on a copy of it
( think had even mailed the author but he just replied that need to pick it from a library as it is no more published)
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Re: Deterrence

Post by hnair »

Roop wrote: I have to say, my impression is that this Sudarshan fellow (from the tone of the article) appears to be some kind of desi NPA, delighted that the test "failed" (in his opinion). This is pure malice, not a technical assessment.
Article is more or less ghost written by the long dead and unlamented Praful Bidwai, who was the prime NPA toolkitter in India at that time. Prafool was a proto-Soros specimen
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Re: Deterrence

Post by SSridhar »

Sudarshan is from The Hindu stable though this article and a few others of similar nature might have appeared in The Indian Express. Very obvious therefore.
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Re: Deterrence

Post by disha »

Sudarshan's (f)article posted in full here:

https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinio ... 93465.html
The father of the dud thermonuclear bomb Dr R Chidambaram is on record describing how a real atomic explosion works. This description is recounted in Raj Chengappa’s engrossing book Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India’s Quest to be a Nuclear Power (Harper Collins, 2000) which provides a broad-brush overview of the development of both India’s nuclear and missile programmes. The author obviously had access to all the main players, the laboratories, which kind of makes it an almost official narrative. Chengappa who interviewed Chidambaram on June 10, 1998, writes (page 187): “Chidambaram’s eyes always light up when he describes what happens when an atom bomb is exploded deep underground. He says that under the intense heat of over a million degrees centigrade (emphasis mine) a mini-mountain of rock vaporises underground. And an equal amount melts… Meanwhile the shock waves of the blast strike the surface and cause a mini-mountain of sand to rise from the ground. The mound formed is called a retarc, the word crater spelt backwards. As the force of the explosion weakens in intensity the mound collapses inwards forming a giant crater.”

What basically happens is that the explosion vaporises material around it and then the vapours expand rapidly and push outwards in all directions creating shock waves that crushes more rock. “At the ‘Taj Mahal’ site (S1 where the fission device, weaponised for delivery through a missile exploded) the shockwaves from the blast lifted a giant mound of sand (page 430), the size of a hockey field (emphasis mine). DRDO’s colonel Umang Kapur who was flying high above in a helicopter to monitor the radioactivity and video film the event saw a plume of dust. As he neared he saw that the bunkers around the side had toppled like a pack of cards. Then, in awe, he watched a giant crater form as the sand poured down through a cylindrical chimney to fill up the cavity deep below the ground. …. On the ground the scientists suddenly felt the earth under their feet quake violently…. (They) ran out in time to see a giant wall of sand akin to a tidal wave rise and fall.”

At the White House site (S2 where the dud thermonuclear device was placed), if we are to go by what the scientists led Chengappa to believe, it was placed at a depth of 200 metres (page 427) in contrast to S1 which was about 50 metres less deep (at “over 150 metres”, page 422). This dud device was rated at 45 kt yield, three times the yield of the fission device in Taj Mahal shaft and was buried about 50 metres deeper, in a shaft a kilometre away. There is, however, good reason to believe that the shafts were not as deep as this since they had been in existence since 1981 and going by the accounts in the book were not deepened when readied for the 1998 tests; scientists familiar with the work say that the deeper shaft did not go as deep as 200 metres. A yield of one kiloton is the explosive energy equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. The bomb that US dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, only a third of the explosive energy the dud thermonuclear bomb allegedly set off.

At the bottom of the second shaft, a kilometre away, was the thermonuclear weapon. It had a fission-based trigger. The second stage was the fusion weapon. The shaft ran more than a 120 metres into the ground. At the bottom it veered slightly to the left, making an ‘L’. After the turn it ran for a further five metres, called an adit. The small tunnel was about six feet high, high enough for a person to stand. The width was about three metres. To get the men and materials into the shaft there was a winch that was suspended from an A Frame run by a diesel motor. The entire shaft was cased and shielded by a thin steel casing of .3 mm. This was to prevent or reduce seepage from subterranean streams that could mess up the wiring, among other things. Both S1 and S2 were old shafts, dug in 1981 when Rammana was adviser to defence minister. But they had been wired up from 1995 when Narasimha Rao was weighing the option of conducting nuclear tests. The three-year-old wiring had been in good working condition and the test team did not have to relay the cables, both for giving the command and for instrumentation, which was the responsibility of the DRDO, and not the BARC. For the 1998 tests, the shafts weren’t deepened or modified further.

The Control Room was about 2.5 km from ground zero. It was a tin shed with air conditioning and had all the instruments both for command cables and cables for instrumentation and recording. It was manned by working scientists and engineers of DRDO; the engineers were directly involved in instrumentation and recording process. Instrumentation within Pokhran was 100 per cent DRDO. Aviation Research Centre seismic instruments were outside Pokhran. The DAE had instrumentation in the shaft for Cortex which was a prototype. (It later transpired that the prototype Cortex failed to work). There were television cameras looking at ground zero, accelerometers, ground motion sensors, and a central recording place where the data stream was slipped. Instrumentation in 1998 was of a much higher order than 1974. This is undisputed.

After the explosion once the helicopter indicated there was no radioactivity in the air, the two teams Bravo (scientists from Bombay) and Delta (those from DRDO) went to inspect their work. According to Raj Chengappa, “The Taj Mahal site had a giant newly formed crater. But the Hydrogen bomb site wasn’t as impressive. A mound of several metres had risen and the sheds all around it had collapsed in a crazy heap. Some of the scientists looked worried. There was concern whether the secondary fusion device had properly detonated… That afternoon, however, Chidambaram and Sikka were confident. They told the rest that because the shaft was a very deep one and located on granite strata the impact on the surface was minimal. Reassured, the team headed back to break the news to the Prime Minister in Delhi.” (pages 431-432). The reconstruction of the final Pokhran moments in the book is based on author’s interviews with Chidambaram, S K Sikka, Anil Kakodkar, K Santhanam and Abdul Kalam.

According to one source who visited the site immediately after the test, apparently Chidambaram and the Bravo team stared in silent disbelief at the failure of the experiment. The blast had failed to even dislodge the winch and the A frame which stood in mute eloquent testimony to the failure. In the distance the scientists could see the yawning hole of the shaft grin mockingly at them. It had been a Gandhi bomb, totally non-violent.

(Tomorrow: Kalam and the Gandhi Bomb)
sudarshan@epmltd.com
About the author:
V Sudarshan is the Executive Editor of ‘The New Indian Express’
Next will be https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinio ... 93693.html
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Re: Deterrence

Post by disha »

Continuation of Sudarshan's (f)article number 2

https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinio ... 93693.html
Kalam’s dual standards
As the country\'s head rocket man, APJ Abdul Kalam was well acquainted with failure-not once but many times.
flipboardfacebooktwittersocial_articletelegram_shareGoogle News
Published: 04th October 2009 11:58 PM | Last Updated: 20th January 2014 07:12 PM | A+A A-
04oct_abdul
When the teams from BARC and DRDO replayed the tapes of the thermonuclear blast at Pokhran after they got back from Ground Zero, there was a further puzzled silence from Chidambaram and his team. The video showed the shaft intact. All that had happened was that the concrete casing that had been used to seal the shaft after it had been filled with sand had blown off. The video showed sand and mud being kicked feebly into the air. The mystery was all the more deep as that shaft had been configured for a fission blast and was not made any deeper. It is all the more strange considering that Raj Chengappa, who was given access to the dramatis personae (Chidambaram, Kalam, Sikka, Santhanam) and whose account (Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India’s Quest to be a Nuclear Power, HarperCollins, 2000) is thus far undisputed by the Establishment, notes that the decision to explode the three devices together was taken (pages 425-426) because it was “felt that the impact of the hydrogen bomb to be lowered into the “White House” may damage the other two shafts — Taj Mahal (for the atomic device) and Kumbakharan (sub kiloton device).” And here, as they stared at the replay, it was obvious that the thermonuclear device, three times as powerful as the fission device, powerful enough to destroy Hiroshima three times over, had left even most of the shaft in which it was buried almost entirely intact.

Whatever happened to the millions of degrees of centigrade of heat Chidambaram had so graphically described, which would exert so much pressure that a crater would be formed (See “The Real Pokhran Story”, October 3)? By that count the crater ought to have been thrice as big as the one formed by the fission device in the first shaft. Could there be any explanation other than the fact that the device was a dud? Worse, Chidambaram, who firmly believed that it was not necessary to conduct any test outside computer simulation, had made no fallback option for additional testing (but that’s another story).

To save the situation, Chidambaram apparently tried to do some impromptu theorising.

He began to suggest that maybe there was some fault that ran under the shaft that had absorbed the brunt of the explosion. His other colleagues, uncomfortable with this glib theorising did not allow him to continue, suggesting, gently, they should take a harder look at the data before they formed an opinion.

Now, of course, Chidambaram sings another tune. He now claims that, “The surface feature produced at Ground Zero depends on the depth of burial and the rock medium around the shot point and the rock medium between the shot point and the ground. These were all different for the two device tests. The fission device was emplaced in rhyolite medium. The medium for the Pokhran-I test was shale and sandstone.

The geology in the Pokhran region is inhomogenous.

The propagation of the shock wave is affected by every interface. 3-D simulation calculations of the rock mechanical effects done by BARC scientists, after considering all these factors, accounted for the observed effects in the thermonuclear test.” Translated into English it would mean that Chidambaram wants us to believe that geology in Pokhran is such that at a distance of only 3,280.84 feet (one kilometre) a device three times as powerful would not make any impact on the surface because there was granite, not rhyolite or shale and sandstone, around it and just because it was buried fifty metres deeper.

It can be argued that granite, being harder, conducts shockwaves much better and produces more accurate readings. Does Chidambaram’s claim make any sense? Moreover, scientists who have participated in underground nuclear tests say that when shafts are dug they try to make sure that they will not be destroyed by an explosion in another shaft in the vicinity. A scientist as sure as Chidambaram is that there is no need to conduct thermonuclear tests should have had the courage of his convictions to test the thermonuclear device alone, giving a gap of, say, five minutes after the fission explosion before testing it. That way the readings would have been crystal clear and there would have been no ambiguity over the success (or failure in this case) of the test.

Here he gave a cock and bull explanation that there was a good chance the device might destroy the other shafts, and therefore the tests were better done simultaneously. When the explosion leaves even the thermonuclear shaft largely untouched Chidambaram comes up with disingenuous and lame post facto rationalisations.

Obviously he had no idea how his thermonuclear weapon would behave. It can thus be argued that Chidambaram wanted to conduct simultaneous explosions so he could obfuscate the data in case the test failed. The test failed. So it looks suspiciously like he is back to mumbo jumbo cover-ups including 3-D computer simulation of rock mechanical effects after he couldn’t find a suitable explanation of his failure. Obviously Chidambaram’s dud thermonuclear bomb is unfit even for low grade (pink) granite quarrying.

Immediately after Pokhran 1 the depth of the shaft was revealed to be 107 metres. Why is Chidambaram silent on how deep the White House shaft was? Further, the cratering of Pokhran 1 and that of the fission weapon are similar and on expected lines even though they were placed in different mediums. Where does that leave Chidambaram’s argument that the cratering depends on the depth as well as the medium a nuclear device is placed in? Chengappa clearly says that the scientists were worried when they saw no nuclear explosion signatures in the White House shaft site (page 431). Who, then, were “some of the scientists (who) looked worried”? Was A P J Abdul Kalam among them? Certainly, his silence at that moment is most curious.

It is in inverse proportion to the decibel level he hits now, shouting that the device did not fail. If he was confident then, he did not show it. Probably because Kalam is no stranger to failure. After Kalam was put in charge of India’s missile programme he learnt the hard way that the path to success is always paved with failure. Thus, while Kalam was project director, the SLV3 in 1979 tumbled into the Bay of Bengal. On February 22, 1988, the first launch of the Prithvi failed.

When Rajiv Gandhi visited the Defence Research and Development Laboratory on August 3, 1988 to witness the indoor testing of Trishul’s motor, much to Kalam’s embarrassment it was a failure. Rajiv apparently told Kalam: “I think your rocket motor has just exploded.” On April 19, 1989, Agni’s launch was aborted following a glitch. The second attempt on May 1 had to be aborted again. In November 1989, according to Chengappa, (page 361), “Prithvi’s subsequent flights had a fair share of goof-ups. Prithvi’s second launch in November 1989 took off well but in the terminal phase rolled uncontrollably and missed the target by several kilometers….In mid 1990 the missile was still far from ready. (page 362). Prithvi’s eighth test saw the missile go up barely a kilometre before coming down like a corkscrew and bursting into flames.” On May 29, 1992, when Agni was launched, “within the first minute after the lift-off ” on the giant monitor screen the scientists “saw the missile break up into two and explode.” (Page 372).

This reporter could go on but this is sufficient to illustrate that Kalam who presided over many, many failures, was applying an entirely different yardstick when it came to Chidambaram’s obviously dud thermonuclear experiment. Here was a situation where Kalam’s own Delta team had deep doubts over the success of the test and all Kalam did was listen thoughtfully all the while backing Chidambaram.

(Maybe Gujral should have given Chidambaram the Bharat Ratna, after all).

The preliminary readings clearly indicated that there had been no explosion of the kind that had been discussed and anticipated by Chidambaram and his team. The ground motion instruments did not pick up readings commensurate with a 45 kilotonne yield. The DRDO team wanted to be doubly sure so they took the time to check and double check before they made their case.

The DRDO team numbered about sixty at the site. The ballistics division, which was involved in the analysis, numbered about thirty.

A core group of about half a dozen prepared the draft, which was reviewed a number of times. To Kalam’s credit he did not hinder this process of review. That he took the side of Chidambaram in is thus all the more inexplicable, considering that the review clearly showed the test had failed. With this, one thing is sure about our deterrence as envisaged by the logic of the thermonuclear bomb: we do not have it.

To think that Chidambaram is science adviser to our Prime Minister. How cute is that?

sudarshan@epmltd.com
disha
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Re: Deterrence

Post by disha »

VSundergaru, thanks for the excellent analysis and some extempore right advice. If one remembers their high school maths and physics well, given the information, they can design one. Building one is altogether different league. So creating one for testing without the physics package is always plausible!
vsunder wrote:Spend time in isolation and prove some hard theorems that is the way to learn mathematics not through internet personalities, or AND read my excellent notes :rotfl: :lol:
^ I think that should be the sentence.
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